Professor Jennifer Granick comments on whether or not encrypted messaging services provide aid to terrorist groups for Vice.

For years, terrorist groups and law enforcement bodies around the world have been in a constant game of cat and mouse as the former finds new platforms on which to talk and organize and the latter tries to catch up. Lately, secure messaging apps that promise to hide users’ messages from prying eyes of all sorts, have given these organizations a relatively simple way to communicate, which raises a question debated hotly by security analysts and privacy advocates: Does giving encryption services to everyone mean providing aid to terrorists?

…

IS claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks by way of Telegram, a Russian-made app that encrypts messages. So confident is the company in their technology that it’s held a “cracking contest,” inviting hackers and others to find a way to beat their security systems and extract secret data. ( No one claimed the $300,000 prize.) The service has a reported 60 million monthly active users and sends 12 billion messages a day, including some that are undoubtedly related to terrorist activity.

…

“It’s a great PR moment (for the government) and it’s going to affect people’s civil liberties,” says Jennifer Granick, an attorney and Director of Civil Liberties for Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society. “The story is, ‘All of a sudden terrorists are able to do these things because of encryption,’ and that’s just crazy. Terrorists have been using encryption for a while. We know very little still about how these attacks were planned.”

…

“There’s this idea that if we know everything everybody does, we’ll be able to prevent (an attack),” says Granick, “and that’s not true. You end up with a million people on the terrorist watch list and you don’t know who to watch.”

Read More