Techdirt Needs Your Help To Fight Encryption Fearmongering

TL;DR: Support our coverage of the encryption battle! In the summer of 2014, we ran a crowdfunding campaign to help support Techdirt, in order to do more in-depth reporting on the big net neutrality fight happening in Washington, DC (and, more broadly, around the globe). That campaign was successful beyond our wildest expectations, and allowed us to do much more thorough reporting (including bringing on Karl Bode to help cover these issues) on such an important issue. We ended up writing well over 300 articles since that campaign ended, and that initiative is still ongoing. Now, we're launching another crowdfunding campaign for an issue that's even more important: the fight over encryption. And so I wanted to ask you to support us again in this new campaign. We literally cannot do this without you: Techdirt needs your help to fight encryption fearmongering. As you almost certainly know, this battle has ramped up in the last few years -- first in response to the Snowden revelations, followed by a rush by many, including Apple, to better encrypt their services and devices. However, law enforcement and the intelligence communities are less than pleased about all of this, and have been pushing for backdoors and other legislative solutions. This is not new. They pushed for such things in the 1990s, in the original "Crypto Wars," and lost. But now they see a new opening to try again. In the last couple weeks, this issue has blown up even more, as the DOJ sought, and received, a court order directing Apple to effectively write special software to allow the FBI to hack into an iPhone to get around existing encryption and security features. And, it's not just about this current Apple fight. Or just the US. Congress is looking at this issue, and other governments are eagerly considering how they can use the US's efforts to serve their own wishes. And that's not to mention various other technologies and companies that have been impacted by this debate already. This is a big deal. It will impact how technology works and how you maintain your security and privacy going forward. It will impact what you get to do on your own devices, and what the government can force companies to do. And not just in the US. The rest of the world is watching closely how this battle plays out, to figure out what they might be able to get away with as well. And, frankly, most of the reporting is abysmal or, at the very least, confused. When the story of the Apple court order broke, most initial reports falsely stated that the court ordered Apple to "break the encryption" on its phones. We were the first site (and for a while, the only site) to post the actual court order and to discuss what it actually said. And t