Security News > 2021 > May > Blessed are the cryptographers, labelling them criminal enablers is just foolish

I'd gotten the crazy idea to write a tool that would encrypt Twitter's direct messages - sent in the clear - so that your private communications would truly be private, visible to no one, including Twitter.

What if someone had used my software, thinking it gave them the assurance of privacy, only to learn - to their peril - that my understanding fell short of providing any security?

In a recent report to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, it asserted that encrypted messaging services - like Telegram, WhatsApp, and Signal - are used 'almost exclusively' for illegal activity, an assertion that would merit an eyebrow raise from many of my friends and business colleagues who use both Signal and WhatsApp as their preferred messaging apps.

The ACIC went on to state, "These platforms are used almost exclusively by SOC groups and are developed specifically to obscure the identities of the involved criminal entities and enable avoidance of detection by law enforcement They enable the user to communicate within closed networks to facilitate highly sophisticated criminal activity."

Authorities have been able to disrupt these criminal activities, even without 'wiretap' access into any secure messaging apps, precisely because criminal activities leave traces for investigators within the real world.

In a world where surveillance capitalism has made each of us ever-more-precisely identifiable and trackable, the need for privacy also provides a necessary penumbra of invisibility, the sort of invisibility a woman needs when she's reaching out to a friend so she can flee her abusive partner.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/05/12/blessed_are_the_cryptographers/