What a missed opportunity. The proper response would have been to "take it under contemplation", get his name & ID, and get as much documentation of the request as possible (enough to verify, does this guy actually work for the FBI, or is it some random "jokester" of the kind that hangs out at security conferences).<p>As it stands, it's basically one level up from an urban myth. Some guy asked her to do something shady at a security conference, and it's easy for the FBI to claim they don't know anything about it.
Sounds more like a marketing sham than a real FBI encounter to me.<p>Really? The FBI agent approached her and started talking to her before she had even removed her mic? And everybody (including the agent) heard?<p>Let me guess, she vehemently denied the offer? (I'll admit I didn't even bother to read past the second paragraph of this "article".)<p>I don't think so...
'in addition to employing who Sell calls the "best crypto people," Sell said that individual messages are bound to their intended device. "Even in 20 years or 100 years, if the NSA miraculously breaks these [encryption] equations, they still wouldn't be able to read these messages."'
uhh, right. And of course this awesome uncrackable crypto relies on private keys stored on teenagers iphones.
"What it's like when the FBI asks you to backdoor your software" : You say 'No' in the most emphatic terms while giving him a dressing down like a boss, apparently.
I don't trust any of them. Period. It makes absolutely no sense to trust any of them. Not when peoples lives are at stake.<p>At this point, if I wanted to use my phone for any truly critical communication (e.g. like in middle eastern countries where lives are literally at stake), I'd only use open source software.<p>You could start a company that had the all of following people as founders:<p><pre><code> Ron Rivest
Adi Shamir
Leonard Adleman
Phil Zimmermann
Whitfield Diffie
Martin Hellman
Dan Bernstein
Bruce Schneier
Edward Snowden
Keith Alexander
Theo de Raadt
</code></pre>
Even if every single one of those people were telling me to trust the software, I still wouldn't. Not without source.<p>Show me the source code. At first glance, I didn't see that option as available at the Wickr web site.<p>BTW stupid of Wickr to not obtain the wickr.com domain. I'll let people google for the real URL just to make my point.
Even if this story were true (which I have no way to verify) all it takes is an NSL, or for that matter a visit in the middle of the night to you and your family with lots of guns, and suddenly your business plan changes.