Squiggling

Crypto-wars, continued: The French police have compiled a detailed report on the Paris terror attacks of last November, Rukmini Callimachi, Alissa Rubin, and Laure Fourquet report for the New York Times, but the few details it offers on how the terrorists allegedly conspired using burner phones and encryption left many security experts fuming. They write, “According to the police report and interviews with officials, none of the attackers’ emails or other electronic communications have been found, prompting the authorities to conclude that the group used encryption. What kind of encryption remains unknown…”

They also add: “One of the terrorists pulled out a laptop, propping it open against the wall, said [a] 40-year-old woman [who was a hostage inside the Bataclan club while it was attacked]. When the laptop powered on, she saw a line of gibberish across the screen: ‘It was bizarre—he was looking at a bunch of lines, like lines of code. There was no image, no internet,’ she said. Her description matches the look of certain encryption software, which ISIS claims to have used during the Paris attacks.”

The ACLU’s Christopher Soghoian tweeted, “The NYT story on the Paris attackers makes as much (if not more) sense if you replace “encryption” with “magic.”” And NYU journalism professor Adam Penenberg tweeted, “The @nytimes proof that the Paris terrorists used encryption is law enforcement can’t locate their emails and a woman saw squiggly lines.”

The issue of whether encryption helped the Paris terrorists is so hot it drew The Wire creator David Simon into a friendly but heated debate on Twitter with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, as David Meyer reports for Fortune. Snowden started it by suggesting, sarcastically, that The Wire could be blamed for terrorists’ use of burner phones. Simon replied by arguing the case for metadata collection, and they were off.

Related: Snowden spoke Saturday in Warsaw at an event by our Personal Democracy Forum Poland co-producers the e-Panstwo Foundation. He called for an international body to arbitrate whistleblower cases.

Rainey Reitman of EFF pens an open letter on the encryption debate to President Obama: “This is about math, not politics.”

A team of researchers at Johns Hopkins found a security flaw in an older version of Apple’s iMessage platform, Ellen Nakashima reports for the Washington Post.

Tech and politics: The Bernie Sanders campaign says it has collected more than 5.7 million campaign contributions so far, compared to 2 million for Hillary Clinton, Nicole Gaudiano reports for USA Today. The Clinton campaign just touted hitting its millionth donor, a benchmark Sanders hit at the end of last year. (Clinton strategist Teddy Goff notes that it took the 2008 Obama campaign almost 13 months to hit its millionth donor while Clinton did it in about 11 months.)

Trump watch: The breakdown of the mainstream media has a lot to do with the rise of Donald Trump, argues Jim Gutenberg, the new media columnist for the New York Times. He notes how the cable networks in particular have been unable to resist the ratings that come with their wall-to-wall coverage of the short-fingered vulgarian’s every utterance.

With Trump addressing the pro-Israel AIPAC lobby today, the Anti-Defamation League’s new director Jonathan Greenblatt writes, for Time magazine, that the organization is redirecting contributions it has received from Trump over the years into its anti-bias programs. He calls on other groups to follow suit. (Longtime followers of the tech-politics space may recall Greenblatt’s work as the founder of All for Good, an open-source platform that aimed to aggregate volunteer opportunities online.)

Anonymous has managed to dump a bunch of Trump’s personal information online, including his social security number, Marie Solis reports for Mic.com. How this is supposed to help stop him is not explained.

Opponents of Trump might want to consider the arguments of longtime nonviolence advocate George Lakey, who writes more empathy for Trump’s supporters, and less confrontational protests, might be the best strategy to blunt his continued rise.

Coming to this late: Network semiotician Valdis Krebs has been mapping the links between political book buyers on Amazon for each presidential cycle going back to 2004, and in this post from January he looks at the relationships among the political books of this cycle, including those by the presidential candidates. One fascinating finding: people who are buying books about Clinton and Sanders are also buying Donald Trump’s Crippled America.

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Applications to the Knight News Challenge, which is focused on how libraries can service 21st century information needs, are due today at 5pm ET.

Your moment of zen: The New York Times’ Ben Widdicombe trolls Mic.com with this hilarious story on “What happens when Millennials Run the Workplace.”