Now that encryption has been elevated to a default technology on mobile devices, the government has heightened its “Going Dark” rhetoric, again on Wednesday insisting during a Senate Judicial Committee hearing that Silicon Valley figure out how to deliver plain-text communication between criminal and terror suspects to law enforcement. FBI Director James Comey and California...

In March when Moxie Marlinspike and Open Whisper Systems released the iOS version of the Signal encrypted messaging app, the noted security researcher promised to expand its reach and among other things, eventually release a desktop version of Signal. That vision was realized on Wednesday with the public availability of the Signal Desktop beta, written...