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Perfect timing for our discussion on Tuesday after break.

First official confirmation that strong encryption is foiling government wiretaps.

Senator John McCain has filed an amendment that would allow the FBI to retrieve email metadata and web browsing history without warrants. He's proposing we expand use of National Security Letters, which get around the need for warrants and often come with gag orders, so that if you receive an NSL asking for data, you can't tell anyone about it.

"With end-to-end encryption in place, not even WhatsApp's employees can read the data that's sent across its network. In other words, WhatsApp has no way of complying with a court order demanding access to the content of any message, phone call, photo, or video traveling through its service. Like Apple, WhatsApp is, in practice, stonewalling the federal government, but it's doing so on a larger front-one that spans roughly a billion devices."

Facial scanning isn't quite to the point where it could be reliably implemented in a school, but it's not far off either.

This was a bit surprising. More and more people are getting smart TVs so this could be a serious problem.

Quote: What you are looking at is one of the many undersea cables that carries inside it, to put it simply, the magic of the Internet. This particular cable, which runs aground on the coast of Florida, has been tapped by the NSA according to Paglen's research. Paglen, an artist who has been documenting the physical footprint of surveillance for years, got scuba-certified in order to go diving "at several locations off the coast of Florida," he says, to find and photograph the cables.

This makes me wonder how ethical it is for the NSA to be so heavily involved in cryptography internationally. Are they building a backdoor into these crytographic systems? If so, how ethical could that be?

Apparently, if you use strong encryption, the NSA pays more attention to you.

Hey, look, the British are reading our emails, too...

And here's Bruce Schneier on that story about Apple's encryption policies thwarting justice. If you read the first piece, you should also read this one.

Malicious adverts have been found on the UK version of the Match.com dating website. Anyone caught out by the booby-trapped ads could fall victim to ransomware, said security company Malwarebytes, which spotted the cyber-threat. The malicious ads appeared on pages of the dating site via an ad network that pipes content to Match and many other places.

This is an interesting cryptography blog by Matthew Green, a cryptographer and professor at Johns Hopkins University.

A blog, by multiple authors, about new results in elliptic curve cryptography.