Paris Police Report Shows No Evidence Of Use Of Encryption

Over the weekend the New York Times ran a piece on the report created by the French anti terrorism police on the Paris attacks.  The report indicates that there is no evidence of use of encrypted email, devices or messaging solutions.

In fact, they used phones that they activated just before the attack (burner phones) and phones taken from the victims.  Since the phones were only active for a few minutes, they didn’t care if someone was able to track them.

The Times decided that since there was no evidence of encrypted email, the attackers must have used encrypted email.  That logic escapes me.  The Times figures that encrypted emails must be invisible.

Now this does not mean that future attackers won’t use encryption, but if they do, at least the smart ones will not use software from countries that require back doors.

Perhaps we need to ban cell phones.  After all, the root of all these issues is people using cell phones.  If we get rid of cell phones, then the attackers will be forced to meet with each other – a much riskier proposition.

There is no simple answer to these problems even though politicians will attempt to create a simplistic solution.

What is likely is that if U.S. companies are forced to put back doors in their software, companies in other countries will avoid buying U.S. technology products, costing profits and jobs.

Information for this post came from Techdirt.

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