Josh Wieder

For the last few days I've had great fun watching James Comey and his pack of Keystone Cyber Cops failing to convince the world that they should be CC'd on everyone's calls, tweets and texts and generally exposing himself as the incompetent, braying ass that he is. Keep in mind the camera adds 10 pounds Dan Froomkin and Natasha Vargas-Cooper over at The Intercept  exposing each of the examples that Comey used to indicate the necessity for breaking cell phone encryption as fabricated - the cases were real, but none of them relied on cell phones or computers to obtain a conviction. In one case of infanticide, the parents who were eventually found guilty had been previously convicted of child cruelty and had the deceased child previously taken from their custody for neglect. Not only did the state not need to read the parents' phones for evidence, if they had read their own files  and demonstrated some inter-agency cooperation they could very likely have prevent

Way back in 1993, the Internet was a very different place. SSL would not be released for another two years; it would take some time after that until it was used commonly. The Clipper Chip project had just been announced, threatening to offer an explicit, physical back door to all electronic communications devices for the US Justice Department and anyone with a basic understanding of computer science. In 1993, Encryption was a weapon . Washington viewed encryption's only function as a wartime tool to protect military and intelligence communications. The notion that encryption could or should be used as a foundation of protecting online commerce and banking simply did not occur to Big Brother. Into this situation came Phil Zimmerman. Phil had designed and programmed an encryption application called Pretty Good Privacy in 1991. Before that time, cryptography tools were almost entirely the purview of those with the biggest of Smarty Pants: mathematicians, logicians, researchers,