Never mind what the government has been saying and how it has been acting for many years now: Americans are being told to switch to encrypted messaging services rather than old-fashioned texts between friends and family. It's a significant reversal, instigated by the revelation that China's government and its affiliates have seriously compromised the security of America's telecommunications infrastructure.
■ So, all that stuff we used to hear about the importance of having backdoors for law enforcement? Forget it! Now it's all encryption, all the time!
■ It's all a matter of finding the lesser among evils -- or, perhaps, of making weighted-risk assessments of the available options. It may be bad if domestic law enforcement can't crack criminal cases because people were encrypting messages and rendering wiretaps useless. It's probably a whole lot worse if a hostile adversary can plug into the essential lines of communications that we've always used with almost no hesitation because what's domestic feels secure (even when it's not).
■ End-to-end communications encryption is rising to the surface as a matter of vital national interest, but it's also time to start considering what to do with data when it's "at rest" -- not traveling from place to place, but residing on the user's devices. We're going to regret not taking storage encryption more seriously than we do now; depending on what else our adversaries have already compromised, it may already be too late for much of what is stored.
