Where Congress fails, encryption delivers on privacy

On Tuesday night, Senate Republicans killed the USA Freedom Act, Congress’ flagship effort to reform some of the most invasive surveillance programs revealed by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. The bill would have ended the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records and metadata under Section 215 of the Patriot Act — a goal backed by major tech companies and civil liberties groups as well as by multiple independent panels that concluded such collection is unconstitutional and hasn’t stopped any terrorist attacks. But even after being watered down and endorsed by the director of national intelligence, the Department of Justice and the White House, the bill fell two votes shy of the 60 needed to proceed to the Senate floor.

That day, the popular messaging service WhatsApp announced it enabled end-to-end encrypted messages by default on Android devices, using software developed by Open Whisper Systems. That means a majority of the service’s 500 million users can now send and receive private messages that no third party (including WhatsApp) can read. The move is likely the largest deployment of such encryption ever, and it will be even bigger once the feature arrives on iPhones and iPads, along with support for encrypted group chats.

There’s room for debate over whether passing the Freedom Act would have been a wise choice for surveillance reform. Some argued the weaker legislation should be pushed through, warts and all; others worried that passing anything less than comprehensive reform would prove ineffective and doom future attempts to rein in the NSA. But one thing is clear: More than a year after Snowden’s revelations, the failure to follow through on any surveillance reform whatsoever has demonstrated how little Congress has challenged the spy agencies it supposedly oversees.

Private companies and citizens know this. That’s why services such as WhatsApp are joining with activists and technologists to embrace encryption as a solution. The logic is simple: If the state isn’t going to protect our privacy, we’ll build technology to protect ourselves from the state.

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/11/whatsapp-privacyencryption.html