In comments published on Thursday, the head of the National Security Agency made a vague suggestion that the November terrorist attack in Paris was made more possible by encryption.
“Some of the communications … were encrypted,” Adm. Mike Rogers said in an interview with Yahoo News. “We did not generate the insights ahead of time. Clearly, had we known, Paris would not have happened.”
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2583591
A number of media outlets presented Rogers’ comments as a condemnation of encrypted messaging, though it isn’t clear whether Rogers was referring to some vague form of “insights” or encryption in particular.
While investigators have suggested that the Paris terrorists had encrypted applications like WhatsApp installed on their smartphones, they were not foundational in coordinating the attacks, since several of the perpetrators lived in the same community.
“Is it harder for us to generate the kind of knowledge that I would like against some of these targets? Yes,” Rogers said in the interview. “Is that directly tied in part to changes they are making in their communications? Yes. Does encryption make it much more difficult for us to execute our mission? Yes.”
In January, Rogers said that in spite of the challenges posed by encryption, it was “foundational to the future” and that getting rid of it, regardless of what lawmakers in the United States try to do, simply was not a possibility.
“Spending time arguing [that] encryption is bad and we ought to do away with it, that’s a waste of time to me,” Rogers said at the time. “We have a very interesting confluence of events coming together for us as a society and as a world right now. Technology is creating capabilities that have only been a dream for most of us as a society … It has revolutionized our world in a way that most of us don’t even recognize.
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2581122
“At the same time, that technology also represents a potential vulnerability. There are people out there who exploit that vulnerability, some for very good reasons, others for not so good reasons. That’s not going to go away,” he added. “We’ve got to figure out how we’re going to deal with that … in a context in which the government is increasingly mistrusted and privacy concerns have never been higher.”
