Here’s the latest from congressional Republicans:
Sen. Richard Burr (R., N.C.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday his panel will launch a review of encryption use. Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) introduced a bill to extend a sweeping telephone data-collection program due to expire at month’s end.
“It is likely that end-to-end encryption was used to communicate in Belgium and France and Syria,” Mr. Burr said. He said encryption was likely because no direct communication among the terrorists was detected….Mr. Cotton’s bill would pause the expiration of a broad phone data-collection program run by the National Security Agency, which is set to end Nov. 29, until the president certifies that a planned replacement is equally effective.
This is crazy. Anyone smart enough to use end-to-end encryption isn’t going to use a package from Microsoft or Google. They’ll find an open-source app instead. There are plenty of them around, and there’s nothing the US Congress can do to stop people from using them. As for the NSA’s metadata program, it’s always had the authority to collect surveillance on overseas users. Nothing about that has changed.
Neither of these proposals seems to be related in any serious way to the Paris attacks. Instead, the attacks are just being used as a handy excuse to push legislation these guys have wanted all along.
Someday we’re going to get Republicans to take national security seriously. I don’t know when. Hopefully it won’t take as long as it does to get them to admit that climate change is real.
