vigilant TV

Dated May 21, but worth mentioning: Italian police say they’ve been unable to read PGP-encrypted files stored on Psion PLCs by members of the Red Brigade. Much of the article is spent detailing the use of PGP by human rights groups, and has quotes from Phil Zimmermann defending PGP and crypto. InfoWorld seems a little unsure on the availability of PGP for the Psion, but there’s a version available here that seems to support most Epoc models.

The Psion devices were seized on March 2 after a shootout on a train travelling between Rome and Florence, Italian media and sources close to the investigation said. The devices, believed to number two or three, were seized from Nadia Desdemona Lioce and her Red Brigades comrade Mario Galesi, who was killed in the shootout. An Italian police officer was also killed. At least one of the devices contains information protected by encryption software and has been sent for analysis to the FBI facility in Quantico, Va., news reports and sources said.

[...]

The software separating the investigators from a potentially invaluable mine of information about the shadowy terrorist group, which destabilized Italy during the 1970s and 1980s and revived its practice of political assassination four years ago after a decade of quiescence, was PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), the Rome daily La Repubblica reported. So far the system has defied all efforts to penetrate it, the paper said.

[...]

Italian investigators have been particularly frustrated by their failure to break into the captured Psions because so little is known about the new generation of Red Brigades. Their predecessors left a swathe of blood behind them, assassinating politicians, businessmen and security officials and terrorizing the population by “knee-capping,” or shooting in the legs, perceived opponents. Since re-emerging from the shadows in 1999 they have shot dead two university professors who advised the government on labor law reform.

– InfoWorld, Red Brigades PDA highlights encryption controversy.