The ignorance around cryptography is mindblowing… This is a quote from a RawStory article:
Investigators looking into the deadly shooting in San Bernardino, California last week have found built-in encryption in the phones of the two shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, authorities told CBS News on Friday. The news comes a day after lawmakers said there wasn’t any evidence that they had used encryption technology.
Newsflash: Encryption is built into every phone, every computer, and pretty much everything else. If something isn’t encrypted, it means that practically anyone could sniff it. Your phone most likely encrypt your 3G and 4G traffic (not so much 2G/GSM tho), and if you are connected over WiFi that too is encrypted. The updates to your computer are (hopefully) downloaded over a encrypted connection to make sure that nobody has hijacked the update process and feeding you malware or trojans instead. Encryption is everywhere! It is the tech equivalent of a lock on the front door!
This entire crypto debate is flawed, in that banning or somehow enforcing weakened of broken encryption will only hurt regular people who rely on it every day to read e-mails, communicate with friends and family, and doing banking online. If someone thinks that only the good guys will have access to any back doors or weak spots, that’s just naive.