"For many years before anyone heard of Snowden, the U.S. government repeatedly warned that terrorists were using highly advanced means of evading American surveillance.
Then-FBI Director Louis Freeh told a Senate panel in March 2000 that "uncrackable encryption is allowing terrorists — Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and others — to communicate about their criminal intentions without fear of outside intrusion."
Or consider a USA Today article dated Feb. 5, 2001, eight months before the 9/11 attack. The headline warned "Terror groups hide behind Web encryption." That 14-year-old article cited "officials" who claimed that "encryption has become the everyday tool of Muslim extremists."
Even the official version of how the CIA found Osama bin Laden features the claim that the Al Qaeda leader only used personal couriers to communicate, never the Internet or telephone.
Within the Snowden archive itself, one finds a 2003 document that a British spy agency called "the Jihadist Handbook." That 12-year-old document, widely published on the Internet, contains instructions for how terrorist operatives should evade U.S. electronic surveillance.
In sum, Snowden did not tell the terrorists anything they did not already know. The terrorists have known for years that the U.S. government is trying to monitor their communications.
What the Snowden disclosures actually revealed to the world was that the U.S. government is monitoring the Internet communications and activities of everyone else: hundreds of millions of innocent people under the largest program of suspicionless mass surveillance ever created, a program that multiple federal judges have ruled is illegal and unconstitutional."
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1126-greenwald-snowden-paris-encryption-20151126-story.html
I don't buy into the whole article. Greenwald's endless attempts to paint his opponents as hypocrites and as motivated by nefarious purposes is dull and unconvincing. Of course they are animated by fear and the desire to protect the US. But it is undeniable that the notion of US electronic spying was known to AQ before Snowden and they took countermeasures.
Once in a while, an attack is going to slip through. Unfortunately, that is the cost of an open, balanced, free society. And once in a while, the security services will need to purge the Augean stable in a place like Molenbeek.
Even so, the intelligence industry's wish for access to communications is not the only interest in play. Privacy also matters. The problem wasn't Snowden. It was the secret expansion of the intelligence apparatus to gargantuan proportions without regard to opposing interests.
The world is awash in paradoxes.
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