Spying on who?!

Everybody is spying on everybody, by doing so it becomes widely accepted. Is it truly acceptable?! The excuse is terrorism: I wasn’t spying on you, I was spying on your presumed terrorists. Now the game is even more facilitated: many intelligence officials are saying that the terrorists in France communicated using encrypted services like WhatsApp. They have been warning about this threat for decades and so for decades nations are spying on each others’. But when did terrorists went dark? 30 years ago WhatsApp wasn’t around yet. Have they always been impenetrable to law enforcement surveillance? Maybe before they just used a generic “encryption method”,…it has to be encrypted, right? Maybe not.

Teenagers last month hacked into the AOL account of the director of the CIA. Every now and then there are spectacular data leaks: our data is so unprotected that even governments are hacked. And here it is the other issue: privacy. Weakening encryption would allow malicious hackers to spy on us, but the real point is that governments don’t like encryption because it impedes mass surveillance. I think instead that “honest” governments don’t need mass surveillance, wherefore there are other methods to get into potential terrorists’ phones and computers, more suited to serious counterterrorism. Because mass surveillance isn’t the only tool to use against terrorists. Governments can break into computers and phones’ doors left open, into other areas of computer weaknesses, where there’s no encryption: it has to be done house by house, phone by phone. Targeted surveillance: respecting our privacy.

Mass surveillance is not suited to analyze data of a very small number of people: it would be like finding needles in haystacks. I think instead they want to hide the somber truth: their failure. They had dossiers on some of the terrorists, but failed to connect the dots: that’s the reality. All the rest is just an excuse for not having identified the tracks.

Facts: many of the Paris attackers lived in the same area, even the same house. They didn’t need to text each others’ and even IF, they were speaking a Moroccan dialect police didn’t understand. Intelligence failed. Period!

This year files containing security information of more than 20 million Americans have been stolen by hackers: this is weaken encryption. I didn’t hear them calling for even weaker defence in that case. How strange!

Though, I’m recalling one thing: a website offering to download a software to decrypt WhatsApp. It must have been a fake, “probably”?

….Always humble,

Angiolino