It does you no good if there is already a back door into the OS (and file storage) of your tablet or phone. Surprise!

Regardless, once the data is captured it can be easily decrypted with today's technology.  There is better encryption out there but you must remember that encryption technology is still classified as a munition and the high end stuff is controlled as such.

Johnny_Rotten wrote:

Emmeran wrote:

Regardless, once the data is captured it can be easily decrypted with today's technology... encryption technology is still classified as a munition and the high end stuff is controlled as such.

My understanding is that such is not the case. That the restrictive laws and attempts to require back doors were shot down in the commercial world. Though the threat to freedom remains dark in the hearts of our overlords.

John Gilmore summed up the accomplishments of the cypherpunks in a recent email: "We did reshape the world," he wrote. "We broke encryption loose from government control in the commercial and free software world, in a big way. We built solid encryption and both circumvented and changed the corrupt US legal regime so that strong encryption could be developed by anyone worldwide and deployed by anyone worldwide,"

Damn, I hate to actually acknowledge this but things seem to be worse than that.  The Fed has Watson level compute power to decrypt anything they decide to intercept at will and within moments and they seem to be currently allowed to do so under current law.  The only federal department which seems to be off limits to budget cuts is this "Homeland Security" monstrosity.  Conservatives want to kill the departments of Education, EPA and SEC but continue to happily fund the this Homeland Security thing Bush created.

Down the slippery slope we slide...

...and I'm more that a bit concerned that this post will come back to haunt me.

doesyourpussyhurt wrote:

In the U.S., telecommunications carriers are required by law to cooperate in the interception of communications for law enforcement purposes under the terms of Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). This was passed in 1994, long before we had a Dept. of Homeland Security. And yes, Clinton was the President at that time.

I have heard, although I don't know how true it is, that our government (NSA) is always searching for key words which cause them to get interested in someone individually. Words like bomb, assassinate, etc. Especially when the calls originate or end in a country which might be harboring terrorists. Again, I don't know if this is true and an internet search yields no definitive results.

In theory, the government is required to get a warrant to intercept any communication, but is that a reality? Who can say.

During the Shrub years, I just assumed the people in this group were all on a government watch list.  I joked about our reunion being held in a Homeland Security Concentration Camp, but I wasn't entirely sure it wouldn't happen.

Because the root OS of most mobile devices are closed source by the manufacturers (even Android OS's are "patched" for each device and the patch source is not released) you hopes of securely storing anything on a mobile device are essentially zero. The manufacturer can open up the basic storage at any time and use it to make copies of the decrypted content as it's prepared for display. It's simple screen logging. Phone makers showed they could do such things (as well as turn on GPS tracking, the camera, the microphone, etc) remotely years ago.

About your only chance for secure storage is to build your own OS (from freely available code that YOU can check for backdoors) and install it on a USB key.

Do you really think that your buttseks pics and bomb recipes are worth it? You would be better off using it to keep that second set of financial books.