When the FBI urges E2EE, you know it's serious business. //

In the wake of the Salt Typhoon hacks, which lawmakers and privacy advocates alike have called the worst telecoms breach in America's history, the US government agencies have reversed course on encryption.

After decades of advocating against using this type of secure messaging, "encryption is your friend," Jeff Greene, CISA's executive assistant director for cybersecurity, told journalists last month at a press briefing with a senior FBI official, who also advised us to use "responsibly managed encryption" for phone calls and text messages.

In December, CISA published formal guidance [PDF] on how to keep Chinese government spies off mobile devices, and "strongly urged" politicians and senior government officials — these are "highly targeted" individuals that are "likely to possess information of interest to these threat actors" — to ditch regular phone calls and messaging apps and instead use only end-to-end encrypted communications.

It's a major about-face from the feds, which have historically demanded law enforcement needs a backdoor to access people's communications — but only for crime-fighting and terrorism-preventing purposes.

"We know that bad guys can walk through the same doors that are supposedly built for the good guys," Virtru CEO and co-founder John Ackerly told The Register. "It's one thing to tap hardline wires or voice communication. It's yet another to open up the spigot to all digital communication." //

Pete 2Silver badge
Who's who?

"We know that bad guys can walk through the same doors that are supposedly built for the good guys,"

Although which are the good / bad guys is increasingly difficult to determine. //

Aleph0
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Re: Who's who?
The Patrician to Captain Vimes, in Guards! Guards!: "I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people," said the man. "You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.". //

Al fazed
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WTF?
Re: I bet . . .
and the only people interested in spying on you are good people, who have your best interests at heart.

A few of us don't believe this bullsh*t, even here in the UK.

ALF. //

Caffeinated Sponge
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Re: I bet . . .
The last I heard, British Conservatives were still all over the idea that 'only people with something to hide should want encryption'.

Of course, as with the Sir Pterry quote above, whilst this is actually true it is built around the easy to sell misconception that the only people with anything to hide are bad people.