Pentagon gives employees encrypted phones, while the FBI lobbies to ban encryption
Privacy for thee, but not for me? Just as the FBI pushes Congress to ban smartphone encryption, which protects users' privacy, the Pentagon has begun giving employees phones with airtight encryption technology.
The phones in question — which would also keep out the prying eyes of the NSA — employ an encryption method that prevents even their manufacturer, Silent Circle, from accessing users' data.
In an interview with Vice, Silent Circle cofounder Mike Janke highlighted the hypocrisy of providing government employees with the very technology another part of the government wants to ban for the rest of us, saying, "[Pentagon workers] need it, why can’t the public need it? Why shouldn’t we be allowed to have it?"
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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