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UK spies collected journalists' email as part of a test
Want to know why many people don't like it when governments call for an end to encrypted communication? Here's why. A new round of Edward Snowden leaks at The Guardian has revealed that the intelligence agents at Britain's GCHQ collected email from major news outlets (including the BBC, Le Monde, the New York Times and the Washington Post) in 2008 while testing a system that stripped out data irrelevant to searches. While it's not clear that the agency singled out the press during the test, there's no indication that it got rid of the messages, either.
Refusing to decrypt data for investigators gets student 6 months in jail
Christopher Wilson is a 22-year-old computer science student with Asperger's syndrome. He's also facing six months in prison for refusing to hand over the encryption keys to police during the course of an investigation. Wilson first found himself on the wrong side of the long arm of the law in October of 2012. At the time, he was suspected of emailing threats to the vice chancellor of Newcastle University, where he was working towards a master's degree, in which he promised to shoot members of the school's staff. The messages were able to be traced to servers that were connected to Wilson, but the allegations could never be substantiated and the charges were eventually dropped. But not before police confiscated several pieces of computer equipment from his home.
