Government officials are wasting no time in attempting to exploit the tragedy in Paris to pass invasive anti-privacy laws and acquire extraordinary new powers that they have wanted for years. In the process, they are making incredibly dishonest arguments and are receiving virtually no pushback from the media.

Absent any actual information or evidence so far about intelligence failures leading up to the deplorable terrorist attack in Paris, pundits spent the weekend speculating that Edward Snowden and surveillance reform were to blame for the fact that the attack went undetected. Then on Monday, in an epic episode of blame shifting, the CIA director, John Brennan, reportedly said privacy advocates have undermined the ability of spies to monitor terrorists. He explained:

Because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that are taken that make our ability collectively, internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging”, adding that there is a “misrepresentation of what the intelligence security services are doing”.

Read Brennan’s comments carefully because they are very revealing. When he says “legal actions”, he’s referring to the fact that multiple federal courts have ruled that the government’s secret mass surveillance on millions of Americans is illegal. So it sounds like the CIA director is saying it’s a shame that intelligence agencies can’t operate completely above the law any more, and is scapegoating any failings on his agency’s part on accountability that is the hallmark of any democracy. (Though he still can apparently operate above the law.)

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More importantly, Brennan’s comments are incredibly dishonest. The post-Snowden USA Freedom Act passed by Congress reformed exactly one of the countless mass spying programs the US runs. It was the one that sucked up the phone calls of Americans only, and here’s the thing: it has been active this whole time and isn’t scheduled to shut down until the end of the month.

Anytime an official laments surveillance reform or attempts to blame Snowden they should be confronted with these facts. Unfortunately, so far they’ve just been met with head nods and no follow-up questions about their own conduct.

Brennan is not the only opportunist seizing on the tragedy to gain more power. The New York police commissioner, Bill Bratton, called it a “game changer” and, insinuated new legislation that would outlaw encryption was necessary by adding: “[Encryption] is something that is going to need to be debated very quickly because we cannot continue operating where we are blind.”



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On the other side of the Atlantic, politicians in the United Kingdom, which already has the most expansive surveillance laws in the western world, are using the tragedy to attempt to rush through their even more invasive, new mass-spying bill that aims at allowing police to see the websites every citizen visits and to force companies like Apple to backdoor their encrypted tools.

We have no idea if these particular terrorists responsible for the barbaric and abhorrent acts that occurred in Paris last week used encryption to communicate – the only evidence is a couple of vague anonymous quotes from unnamed “officials”. But given that now billions of people are using encryption in the modern world – whether it’s iPhones, Facebook’s WhatsApp or a host of open-source tools – it’s no surprise that along with countless law-abiding citizens, bad people are using it too. (Just as murderers in the US also drive cars available to everyone for getaways and white-collar criminals use lawfully purchased paper shredders to further their crimes.)

But the idea that this is somehow Snowden’s fault is preposterous: it’s been well documented in virtually every mainstream newspaper that terrorists have been using sophisticated encryption tools since the 1990s – long before anyone knew Snowden’s name. Yet know-nothing pundits have been allowed to spew this slander without a hint of pushback from interviewers despite the abundant evidence to the contrary.

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Glenn Greenwald meticulously detailed how Snowden or tech companies like Apple are just convenient scapegoats for intelligence agencies with almost unlimited budgets, extraordinary powers and virtual immunity that are also responsible for policies that often only exacerbate the terrorism problem rather than mitigate it.

Completely ignored in the debate is also the fact that even with encryption becoming more widespread, intelligence agencies still have ample resources to track the phones of terrorism suspects, see everyone they are talking to and hack their phones and computers if they need to see their communications. That’s the thing about the Snowden revelations: you’ll never hear anyone say that the US or French government shouldn’t be conducting surveillance of suspected terrorists with proper court oversight. Of course they should. It’s surveilling everyone else’s communications without a warrant that is the problem.

Strong end-to-end encryption is vital for billions of ordinary citizens’ privacy and security and undermining it would have severe consequences. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a statement on Monday: “any ‘backdoor’ into our communications will inevitably (and perhaps primarily) be used for illegal and repressive purposes rather than lawful ones”.

The fact that officials are so eager to push for extraordinary new powers in the wake of this attack is not surprising. It was just a couple of months ago that the Washington Post published leaked emails from the general counsel for the director of national intelligence, Bob Litt, in which he said that although the legislative environment is very hostile today “it could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement” and that there’s value in “keeping our options open for such a situation”.

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Now we are faced with that situation. We are all appalled by the shocking events in Paris, but let’s not use them as an excuse to change our way of life and strip so many law-abiding citizens of their rights.