By Jeff Mason AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday made a passionate case for mobile devices to be built in such a way as to allow government to gain access to personal data if needed to prevent a terrorist attack or enforce tax laws. Speaking at the South by Southwest festival

While the Justice Department wages a public fight with Apple over access to a locked iPhone, government officials are privately debating how to resolve a prolonged standoff with another technology company, WhatsApp, over access to its popular instant messaging application, officials and others involved in the case said. No decision has been made, but a court fight with WhatsApp, the world’s largest mobile messaging service...

One of the key lines that various supporters of backdooring encryption have repeated in the last year, is that they "just want to have a discussion" about the proper way to... put backdoors into encryption. Over and over again you had the likes of James Comey insisting that he wasn't demanding backdoors, but really just wanted a "national conversation" on the issue (despite the fact we had just such a conversation in the 90s and concluded: backdoors bad, let's move on.).

David Greene talks to former national security official Richard Clarke about the fight between Apple and the FBI. The FBI wants an iPhone that was used by one of the San Bernardino shooters unlocked.

In an exclusive interview with TIME, Cook discusses your privacy, America’s security, and what’s at stake in the battle over encryption. The day after the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., where Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik shot to death 14 people and wounded 22 others at a holiday luncheon for the county department of public health, an FBI Evidence Response Team descended on the couple’s townhouse in nearby Redlands.

It’s a beautiful Saturday afternoon and you find yourself in your car, bound for the supermarket. As you approach a stoplight you lightly apply pressure to the brakes, but your vehicle doesn’t slow down. Slightly more panicked now, you push the brake to the floorboard. Still nothing. Your panic reaches a fury pitch as you find yourself coasting headlong into the intersection and oncoming traffic. As the airbag explodes in your face, you can’t help but wonder how...

Apple’s growing arsenal of encryption techniques — shielding data on devices as well as real-time video calls and instant messages — has spurred the U.S. government to sound the alarm that such tools are putting the communications of terrorists and criminals out of the reach of law enforcement. But a group of Johns Hopkins University researchers has found a bug in the company’s vaunted encryption, one that would enable a...

After meeting with President Raul Castro today, President Obama said in an exclusive interview with ABC News' David Muir that he believed the Cuban leader "truly" wanted change in the island nation and that Cuba would become "more prosperous" in the future. "For 50 years, they have used American aggression or interests in regime change as the excuse for why they had to guard against dissent inside of Cuba. ... As normalization occurs...

Is encryption a basic human right? Amnesty International believes so, becoming one of the latest to weigh in on the Apple v FBI case. In this world of digital communication, encryption is intrinsically tied to privacy and the right to free speech. Amnesty has speculated that undermining encryption as the FBI requested from Apple could potentially open a ‘Pandora’s Box’ for human rights.

A leaked draft reportedly obtained by The Hill has provided our very first glimpse at that bill, which has been promised for months by Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and Richard Burr (R-North Carolina). And despite multiple delays, it seems to be exactly as tone-deaf and poorly-considered as security and legal experts expected.

FBI Director James Comey gave a speech this week about encryption and privacy, repeating his argument that "absolute privacy" hampers law enforcement. But it was an offhand remark during the Q&A session at Kenyon College that caught the attention of privacy activists: The thought of the FBI chief taping over his webcam is an arresting one for many. His comment Wednesday (which is around the 1:34:45 mark in this video) was in...

A high-level surveillance probe of Montreal's criminal underworld shows that Canada's federal policing agency has had a global encryption key for BlackBerry devices since 2010. The revelations are contained in a stack of court documents that were made public after members of a Montreal crime syndicate pleaded guilty to their role in a 2011 gangland murder. The documents shed light on the extent to which the smartphone manufacturer...

It's the bill that has everyone up in arms. In the wake of the dispute between Apple and the FBI over encryption, Congress has weighed in with its long-awaited response, and it was the definition of what people didn't want. The bill, released last week by Sens. Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), two leading senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee, would require tech companies and phone makers to decrypt customer data at a court's request.

FBI Director James Comey suggested Thursday that the bureau paid more than $1 million to access an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino attackers, the first time the agency has offered a possible price tag in the high-profile case. While speaking at a security forum in London hosted by the Aspen Institute, Comey would not offer a precise dollar figure, saying only that it cost “a lot” to get into the phone. He said the cost of the tool was “more than I will...

The Let's Encrypt certificate authority issued its two millionth certificate on Thursday, less than two months after the millionth certificate. As we noted when the millionth certificate was issued, each certificate can cover several web sites, so the certificates Let's Encrypt has issued are already protecting millions and millions of sites.

The director of national intelligence on Monday blamed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for advancing the development of user-friendly, widely available strong encryption. “As a result of the Snowden revelations, the onset of commercial encryption has accelerated by seven years,” James Clapper said during a breakfast for journalists hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. The shortened timeline has had “a profound effect on our...

The story of how Bletchley Park codebreakers decrypted top secret Nazi communications

EFF is proud to introduce Certbot, a powerful tool to help websites encrypt their traffic. Certbot is the next iteration of the Let's Encrypt Client; it obtains TLS/SSL certificates and can automatically configure HTTPS encryption on your server. It's still in beta for now, but we plan to release Certbot 1.0 later this year.

Google on Wednesday became the latest major technology company to join a standoff with the FBI over encryption. At its developer conference, the company announced that its new messaging app, Allo, would feature an “incognito mode” that offered end-to-end encryption. Such technology can make it difficult for law enforcement to recover messages during investigations even if they have a warrant. In Washington DC, the FBI director, James Comey, has lobbied...

For codebreakers with the allied forces, it was more important a discovery than the Enigma machine, offering encryption for the Nazi command that, when cracked, would hasten the end of the second world war and lead to huge breakthroughs in modern computing. Less than 80 years later, for a thrifty woman in Essex, the “telegram machine” was little more than a dusty old gadget languishing in the garden shed. But after an eagle-eyed volunteer with the National Museum of Computing (NMC) spotted an ad on eBay this week, the extremely rare, military-issue Lorenz teleprinter has been saved and provides the latest piece in...