ISIL using tip from Snowden to thwart US intelligence

Rowan Scarborough:

The Islamic State terrorist army is snatching up the latest off-the-shelf encrypted applications to hide their military planning, with fighters publicly thanking former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden for tipping them on U.S. spying tactics.

The West’s fertile tech laboratories have unwittingly become the Islamic State’s research and development arm for free messaging software. It uses the apps to recruit followers, defeat the U.S.-led coalition and expand conquests in Iraq and Syria.

The Islamic State’s mastery of secure communications is an especially important advance because its commanders do their attack planning — and then execution — via the Internet and smartphones. The Islamic State, also known as ISIL and ISIS, has set up cybercommand posts. It recently published photos it said showed commanders orchestrating a suicide bombing and relaying information from the Internet by cellphone to the attackers.
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These programs and apps should be banned since they are a threat to US national security.  The government should get access to the encryption data to learn how to decode enemy messages.  This is probably on if the reasons for the increase in successful terrorist attacks since Snowden started disclosing how the US got the data.  A lot of people are being killed because of this encryption.