Hello! It is Friday. I made an encrypted phonecall for the first time this week using Open Whisper Systems’ iPhone app Signal, and it was…well, pretty much like any other call I’ve ever made. Which is to say, easy! You should certainly give it a try.

The FCC is investigating stingrays. Not the funny-looking ocean dwellers, but so-called IMSI catchers—which, in simple terms, are devices that masquerade as cell phone towers so that law enforcement agencies can intercept calls, messages, and location data, amongst other identifying information. Casually snooping on the cellular activities of potentially hundreds of customers at the same time might not be the most reasonable definition of “reasonable search” here. Meanwhile, Here’s a good reminder of just how much data is involved when law enforcement agencies make requests for information on all phones connected to a cell tower.

A bunch of developers in Montreal are attempting to create a new, secure operating system called Subgraph OS that would not only serve as an alternative to Tails, but is apparently resistant to zero-day exploits, according to Vice. This one’s a few weeks old, but h/t to Bethany Horne for bringing it to my attention.

If you want to wade into the weeds of Canadian law this week, here’s a great analysis of a recent court decision that’s closed the door on warrantless searches of “USB keys, memory cards for cameras, and similar devices.” (The argument used to be that these things weren’t computers, and merely receptacles for data created by computers, which, well.

I figured we’d be Snowden’d out of Edward Snowden profiles by now, but then comes James Bamford with Wired’s August cover story. The whole things is certainly worth a read, but if you just want the new stuff: apparently the NSA tried to install malware on a major router in Syria in 2012, but ended up taking the whole country’s internet offline instead; Snowden says he left clues so investigators would know what documents he actually took; and the NSA has a new program called MonsterMind that can not only detect incoming cyberattacks, but attack back automatically.

Either you’ve heard a lot about PGP in the last year, or you’re already using it and well aware of how painful the whole experience of sending encrypted email can be. Here, John Hopkins University research professor and cryptographer Matthew Green argues quite plainly and succinctly: “It’s time for PGP to die.”

This week in satellites that are likely the property of Major League Baseball: the newly launched WorldView-3 is perhaps the most powerful commercial satellite ever launched. “If the satellite were over a baseball stadium, it’d be able to make out home plate and the individual players.”

Lastly: Colin Freeze writes that, over five years ago now, reforming Canada’s cyberspy agency CSEC had once been a priority for the government, but those plans were obviously derailed. Meanwhile, Bill Robinson does some more amazing sleuth work in further analyzing CSEC’s airport wifi tracking initiative (and get’s a much-deserved nod from The Globe and Mail for doing so, too.)

This week’s surveillance slowjam? Holy shit this Hot Chip cover of Arthur Russell’s “Go Bang.” It’s more of get-up-and-dance-jam, really. I need another name for these things.