RodRosenstein

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  • Illustration by D. Thomas Magee

    Great, now there's 'responsible encryption'

    by 
    Violet Blue
    Violet Blue
    10.27.2017

    Trump's Department of Justice is trying to get a do-over with its campaign to get backdoors onto iPhones and into secure messaging services. The policy rebrand even has its own made-up buzzword. They're calling it "responsible encryption." After Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein introduced the term in his speech to the U.S. Naval Academy, most everyone who read the transcript was doing spit-takes at their computer monitors. From hackers and infosec professionals to attorneys and tech journalists, "responsible encryption" sounded like a marketing plan to sell unsweetened sugar to diabetics.

  • SAUL LOEB via Getty Images

    US intelligence wants to make a key foreign surveillance law permanent

    by 
    Andrew Tarantola
    Andrew Tarantola
    06.07.2017

    The directors of America's federal intelligence agencies appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday in an effort to convince the governing body to permanently extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law that enables the federal government to monitor the communications of non-US citizens on foreign soil who are communicating with Americans here in the United States regarding matters of national security. Essentially, it enabled the intelligence community to eavesdrop on conversations between suspected terrorists and their associates, even if some of them happen to be US citizens.