From Michael Riley and Jordan Robertson at bloomberg.com:
‘Decision memo’ directs agencies to find ways to access data
Officials met around Thanksgiving to discuss encryption plans
Silicon Valley celebrated last fall when the White House revealed it would not seek legislation forcing technology makers to install “backdoors” in their software — secret listening posts where investigators could pierce the veil of secrecy on users’ encrypted data, from text messages to video chats. But while the companies may have thought that was the final word, in fact the government was working on a Plan B.
In a secret meeting convened by the White House around Thanksgiving, senior national security officials ordered agencies across the U.S. government to find ways to counter encryption software and gain access to the most heavily protected user data on the most secure consumer devices, including Apple Inc.’s iPhone, the marquee product of one of America’s most valuable companies, according to two people familiar with the decision.
The approach was formalized in a confidential National Security Council “decision memo,” tasking government agencies with developing encryption workarounds, estimating additional budgets and identifying laws that may need to be changed to counter what FBI Director James Comey calls the “going dark” problem: investigators being unable to access the contents of encrypted data stored on mobile devices or traveling across the Internet. Details of the memo reveal that, in private, the government was honing a sharper edge to its relationship with Silicon Valley alongside more public signs of rapprochement.
On Tuesday, the public got its first glimpse of what those efforts may look like when a federal judge ordered Apple to create a special tool for the FBI to bypass security protections on an iPhone 5c belonging to one of the shooters in the Dec. 2 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California that killed 14 people. Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has vowed to fight the order, calling it a “chilling” demand that Apple “hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers.” The order was not a direct outcome of the memo but is in line with the broader government strategy.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Wednesday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice have the Obama administration’s “full” support in the matter. The government is “not asking Apple to redesign its product or to create a new backdoor to their products,” but rather are seeking entry “to this one device,” he said.
Security specialists say the case carries enormous consequences, for privacy and the competitiveness of U.S. businesses, and that the National Security Council directive, which has not been previously reported, shows that technology companies underestimated the resolve of the U.S. government to access encrypted data.
To continue reading: Secret Memo Details U.S.’s Broader Strategy to Crack Phones
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 
Reblogged this on Starvin Larry.
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Given how much effort China’s military makes to steal every Western innovation from Day One, the NSA people might as well work for the PLA.
All of this was dealt with in the early 1990’s when Phil Zimmerman uploaded Pretty Good Privacy, the first widely available public key encryption system, to the Internet. Unless the threatened existence of quantum computers actually becomes reality, modern encryption algorithms are unbreakable for practice purposes if the user employs a modicum of common sense.
The masses of people are truly bovine, and really don’t care if Uncle Sam (and his Chinese cousins) are pawing through their underwear and other communications. But those who actually don’t wish to live in a glass house wearing transparent clothing have easy alternatives like Veracrypt and other open source systems that employ open-source algorithms, tested as reliable by the marketplace of reputation.
Like the security theater at Airports would never stop determined, intelligent criminals (access by ground crews are the weakest link everywhere), those with serious designs on privacy will always use systems that are likely unbreakable. Unless Uncle Sam wants to start threatening private citizens with jail for implementing what amounts to lines of code, all this is a much ado about nothing.
As usual.
To pimp my one and only novel, published in 1999 (by iUniverse), conjecture about the importance of strong encryption forms the basis for the plot of Revolutionary Language.
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