Exploiting Emotions About Paris to Blame Snowden, Distract from Actual Culprits Who Empowered ISIS
Glenn Greenwald
One key premise here seems to be that prior to the Snowden reporting, The Terrorists helpfully and stupidly used telephones and unencrypted emails to plot, so Western governments were able to track their plotting and disrupt at least large-scale attacks. That would come as a massive surprise to the victims of the attacks of 2002 in Bali, 2004 in Madrid, 2005 in London, 2008 in Mumbai, and April 2013 at the Boston Marathon. How did the multiple perpetrators of those well-coordinated attacks -- all of which were carried out prior to Snowden's June 2013 revelations -- hide their communications from detection?
Spying on Congress and Israel: NSA Cheerleaders Discover Value of Privacy Only When Their Own Is Violated
Glenn Greenwald
In January 2014, I debated Rep. Hoekstra about NSA spying and
he could not have been more mocking and dismissive of the privacy
concerns I was invoking. "Spying is a matter of fact," he scoffed.
...
But all that, of course, was before Hoekstra knew that he and
his Israeli friends were swept up in the spying of which he was so fond.
Now that he knows that it is his privacy and those of his comrades
that has been invaded, he is no longer cavalier about it.
In fact, he's so furious that this long-time NSA cheerleader
is actually calling for the criminal prosecution of the NSA
and Obama officials for the crime of spying on him and his friends.
Why Governments Lie About Encryption Backdoors
Lauren Weinstein
They know that the smart, major terrorist groups will never use systems
with government-mandated backdoors for their important communications,
they'll continue to use strong systems developed in and/or distributed
by countries without such government mandates, or their own strong
self-designed apps.
So it seems clear that the real reason for the government push for
encryption backdoors is an attempt not to catch the most dangerous
terrorists that they're constantly talking about, but rather a
selection of "low-hanging fruit" of various sorts.
In other words, what we're seeing play out right now may be
the federal government's first real attempt to get "the camel's
nose under the tent" of strong phone encryption systems,
to try demonstrate any feasibility of full-blown backdoor attacks
against these systems.
...
For if the government can gain access to these systems in such manners,
it is axiomatic and unquestionable that evildoers of all stripes will
find ways to do so as well, in a black hat hacking dream come true.