It's becoming increasingly clear that the Paris terrorists were using "dark channels" to plan their attacks. A "dark channel" is a means of encrypted communication protected by methods so sophisticated the FBI and other agencies cannot decode them.
In the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations, libertarians were up in arms about protecting "privacy," as if little Susie's diary were what intelligence agencies are interested in. FBI Director Jim Comey has warned about this, but to no avail.
As Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution now writes, however:
Evidence that terrorists were, in fact, using strong end-to-end encryption to kill people could be game-changing in a debate that has heretofore been defined by anxieties about NSA. The tech companies won the first round of the current encryption battles in large measure because the concerns the intelligence and law enforcement community have about "going dark," while acutely real to them, are pretty hypothetical on public evidence. All that could change in an instant were it to emerge that the Paris attackers were using technology specifically chosen to secure their communications from those charged with stopping terrorist attacks.
Libertarians do a lot of chest-thumping about how much they're trying to protect the Constitution (that they alone care about, apparently). In an age of a politicized Justice Department, who can much blame them? But here's a question they need to consider: If we are blinded to grotesque terrorist plans because of libertarian breast-beating about "privacy," will it be the libertarians who pay the price -- or little Susie, out with her mother for a celebration at a restaurant in Paris?
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