Every single ones of those techniques can and would be bypassed (the app store banning would be the easiest). The ISPs would be operating on an "anti-virus" principle, and they'd be too slow to stop "zero-day-like" hiding of encrypted communications before an attack would happen. There are already plenty of apps that stop carriers from knowing when someone is using tethering apps, when the carriers don't want them to use those types of apps.

As someone was saying on Twitter, intelligence agencies should not want terrorists to start using steganography...which would make their passive traffic analysis much harder. But if they start censoring and banning encryption apps (which use metadata all in the clear), that's exactly what will happen.

Also, it seems most people live with the impression that "if only current apps such as Signal, Tor, etc" would be banned, that should pretty much put an end to encrypted, hidden communications, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. Right now they are being "lazy" and just use what's available to them, like Telegram and whatnot. But if those apps were actively banned, they would focus on building their own, perhaps with forked Signal/Telegram sources. But even without those, they could still commit to building their own solutions.

To give you an analogy, look what's happening with the Silk Road-like world. Authorities stopped Silk Road - like twice or third times already. But the underground online drug market is bigger than ever - it just split into multiple smaller markets. If that happened with drug businesses and drug delivery, it should be much easier to happen with "chat apps".

People would still want strongly encrypted apps especially if they were actively banned by oppressive governments.

> They could demand access to interception or else the app [store] is not allowed.

Thus forcing terrorists to use Android or a desktop OS? Big whoop.

It's not as if they can't tell Google to put out a 'special' version for their country. Or put out their own infiltrated version and take whatever measures necessary to "own" the OS. They could poison DNS for "favorite terrorist distro".

It's not to make it 100% foolproof, it's to make it so that any misstep would reveal them. In other words, make the whole of their communications system leaky _somewhere_ not necessarily everywhere.

The systems are already leaky (like the metadata, for instance, but also the weak end-point security most devices have, poor HTTPS implementations, and so on). This is not a problem. The problem is the intelligence agencies have too many "targets". They're only making things harder for themselves putting everyone on "lists". At least one of the terrorists from the recent Paris attack was on such list - an "extremist" list even. Didn't seem to help.

I think it's becoming more clear that intelligence alone is not enough.

I'm also very worried that 10 years from now we'll have an even bigger problem than Daesh in the Middle East, even if Daesh is "wiped out" - Al Qaeda was wiped out, too, unless we forget. Daesh is much bigger than Al Qaeda was, which means they have many more relatives and children than Al Qaeda had - children that may rise up again in 10 years to avenge their fallen fathers and cousins.

France's reaction feels very much knee-jerk and 20th century thinkining - "Someone attacked us? Let's bomb the hell out of them then!". It kind of reminds me of when the French generals ordered their foot troops into the Germans' machine guns a century ago, because that was their 19th century thinking at the time.

This is a whole other discussion that also needs to happen, and I think a much bigger issue than the encryption one.

The problem isn't the volume of data, it's the analysis and graphing. They need to develop better mining technology.

Conversely, if there is too much data and everything is hidden because there is too much, then why bother with the clamor for encryption? I mean, there is so much data, it's unfindable?

I think it was Poland and Russia sending cavalry and barely armed infantry into modern battle, not France during WWII.

In almost all the terrorist attacks that have happened recently at least one of the perpetrators has been known to the authorities. This tells me that the problem is failing to properly follow up on leads rather than missing people completely. This leads me to suggest that more dragnet surveillance is not needed instead we need targeted surveillance.