One of the stories we were being told during and after the Tottenham riots wa...

Julian Bond - 2013-06-17 07:21:02+0000 - Updated: 2013-06-17 07:26:30+0000

One of the stories we were being told during and after the Tottenham riots was that Blackberry BBM was secure and controlling the riots was harder because this was the comms tool of choice for the gangs and rioters. How does that square with this story; So GCHQ can intercept BBM, but the Police can't?

Meanwhile, Apple claim that iMessage and FaceTime services are encrypted from end-to-end. (http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/06/17/apple-says-it-received-4000-5000-data-requests-from-us-officials-in-last-6-months/) Yes. Well. That's what Skype said. Originally we believed them. Now I'm not so sure. Perhaps the NSA revelations will make end to end security a major feature requirement again in chat and voice message systems. So how about it, Google Hangouts/Messanger/Chat and Facebook? Unfortunately that requirement works against cross platform and web based chat systems which we also want for convenience.

GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians' communications at G20 summits

William Buist - 2013-06-17 22:33:00+0000

Same old same old. If they want to listen then they will, if they can't they'll make it up.

Julian Bond - 2013-06-18 06:25:28+0000

Somewhere around 1990 I got a copy of PGP via Archie and a compuserve email gateway from the Imperial college servers. Yay, provably uncrackable encryption! Just as long as you could trust everyone else in the chain and hide all your tracks via anonymous remailers like penet.fi But then Terror! Children! Riots! More Terror! And anyway I had nothing to hide (much) and nobody else to talk to who could handle the geeky tools.