7:44

How do terrorists communicate to hide from investigators?

We know little about the means used by those involved in the deadly attacks in Paris, but intelligence and security officials have already launched a new wave of chatter about encryption.

First, The New York Times reported that anonymous European officials were saying they believed the Paris attackers had used some kind of encrypted communication, “but offered no evidence.”

Now NBC News is citing unnamed officials as suggesting “the ISIS geek squad is teaching terrorists how to use encryption and communication platforms like Silent Circle, Telegram and WhatsApp.”

There was even a Forbes story that suggested the terrorists talked over Sony PlayStation 4, that has now been invalidated.

One thing is clear: The investigation into the attacks is ongoing, and no specific evidence of encrypted or other communications has been confirmed.

Yet it has renewed the debate about encryption and the headaches that intelligence and law enforcement officials say it’s created for their investigations.

What we’re talking about is not your emails or Web searches, photos or social network posts. Those things get encrypted on your laptop and then decrypted and stored on a big corporate data server. There, law enforcement officials have the technical and legal ability to get access to the content, for instance, with a subpoena.

What’s raising the concerns is so-called end-to-end encryption: when data gets encrypted on one device and only gets decrypted when it reaches the recipient’s device. Think Apple iMessage, WhatsApp or FaceTime.

And for a while now, the law enforcement and intelligence communities in the United States, and to some extent in Europe, have been asking tech companies (which are pushing back) to give them basically a back door into these kinds of encrypted communications.

“From the law enforcement perspective, we describe this experience of going dark, that we no longer can penetrate the darkness to conduct our investigations,” New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton tells NPR’s Ari Shapiro. “It’s a very significant negative effect on our ability to detect and disrupt terrorist-related activity.”

Safer With Or Without Back Doors?

CIA Director John Brennan made this case against encryption on Monday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington:

“There has been a significant increase in the operational security of a number of these operatives and terrorist networks as they’ve gone to school on what it is that they need to do in order to keep their activities concealed from the authorities. And as I mentioned, there are a lot of technological capabilities that are available right now that make it exceptionally difficult both technically as well as legally for intelligence security services to have the insight they need to uncover it.

“In the past few years because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that are taken that make our ability, collectively, internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging. And I do hope that this is going to be a wake-up call.”

The hand-wringing of course refers to the fallout of the Edward Snowden leaks, which showed, among other things, how the National Security Agency tapped into data centers and otherwise dealt with tech companies. That prompted a bigger push toward end-to-end encryption that would limit the companies’ role in the surveillance process.

After months of debate, in October, the Obama administration appeared to back down from the push for encryption back doors.

Some of the considerations were these: If America asked for back doors, what would stop China, Russia or any other country from demanding the same kind of access? Or, in light of massive hacks of government data, what would convince the companies that the federal agencies could properly protect the keys they’d be given?

“The reality is that if you have an open door in your software for the good guys, the bad guys get in there, too,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told NPR’s Robert Siegel in October. “I don’t support a back door for any government, ever.”

In fact, the notion of law enforcement “going dark” in the face of new technology has floated since the 1990s and the dawn of the Internet, when law enforcement organizations pushed for access to communications services.

A group of computer scientists and security experts that had studied the topic then, reviewed it again in recent months and found high risk of unanticipated, hard-to-detect security flaws.

“We have found that the damage that could be caused by law enforcement exceptional access requirements would be even greater today than it would have been 20 years ago,” they wrote in the abstract of their July paper for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Encryption Whack-A-Mole

Tech companies and privacy advocates also argue that the government doesn’t need encryption back doors to carry out terrorism surveillance.

“Most consumer-oriented encryption systems that are deployed today protect the content of a message. They do no protect the metadata — they do not hide who is talking to whom,” says Moxie Marlinspike, founder of Open-Whisper Systems that created TextSecure, the open-source encryption tool adopted by WhatsApp last year.

“So if you have a network of terrorists communicating with a known ‘home base,’ intelligence agencies will still be able to see that,” he says.

Nate Cardozo, a lawyer on the civil liberties team at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, went even further, suggesting that the back-door push by the intelligence and law enforcement community is less about terrorism and more about collecting as much information as possible. He accused the CIA’s Brennan of political opportunism — using the Paris tragedy to push for an existing agenda.

“We are in a golden age of surveillance. Right now it is easier for the CIA, the NSA, the FBI to surveil anyone, anytime, anywhere than it ever has been, even despite encryption,” Cardozo tells All Tech.

“If we learned anything from the Snowden revelations, it’s that the NSA and intelligence agencies around the world, including in France, are not suffering from the lack of information, rather they’re suffering from the exact opposite. They have so much data that they’re collecting, they have trouble filtering the signal from the noise.”

And ultimately, he says, even if all existing encrypted devices got a back door, there would always be ways of circumventing those back doors — all it takes is a new app to restart the whack-a-mole.

“Trying to regulate encryption is like trying to regulate an idea,” Marlinspike says. “It’s going to be very difficult if not impossible to do.”

Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, summed it up this way:

“It’s too early, I think, to say in terms of the attack in Paris to what extent these terrorist may have used encrypted communications,” he told NPR on Monday. “Even with the best of intelligence resources, there are still vulnerabilities and ultimately it’s going to require us to eliminate that sanctuary in Iraq and Syria.”

4:15

Many Americans feel they can’t save any money for the future. Yet if an employer automatically enrolls workers in a 401(k) plan and matches some of their contributions, 90 percent of people stick with it and save and invest for retirement.

Now, what if your employer doesn’t do that for you? What can you do? People in NPR’s new Your Money and Your Life Facebook group wanted to know.

Alex Browning, 26, works at Green Meadows Farm in Hamilton, Mass. “There isn’t a savings benefit plan and there isn’t a lot of room to breathe financially,” she says.

Both she and her co-worker Erin Feeney said they joined the Facebook group because they know they have to figure this out for themselves. “I’ve always had short-term, nonprofit work since I finished college and none of those jobs offer any kind of savings benefits at all,” Feeney says. “That’s kinda scary. I know I have to start a Roth IRA but what do I have to do to do that? I don’t know.”

On Your Own

We decided to answer this question: What’s the best way to set up a retirement account on your own — and in a way that you’re likely to keep contributing money to it?

“The most important thing is to get started,” says Brigitte Madrian, a behavioral economist and professor at Harvard University. “The biggest mistake that people make is procrastination.”

But the most important thing is also the hardest thing. This is why it’s such a huge advantage if an employer enrolls you automatically. Left to our own devices, we humans have a bunch of what are called “behavioral biases” that get in the way.

‘We’re Focused On The Present’

“The term that I think applies best is ‘present biased,’ ” Madrian says. “We’re focused on the present and less focused on things that will make us better off in the future.” That’s a big reason that we tend to be so bad at saving. More than half of U.S. households have precariously low savings.

Another problem is there’s no deadline to give us a kick in the pants to set up a retirement account, like there is with paying our taxes, for example. We’d never get around to doing that if we didn’t have the federal government forcing us to do it by April 15.

But, Madrian says there are good ways to nudge yourself into starting a good retirement account.

“There’s a lot of research that plan-making can help people follow through on their good intentions,” she says. “And the research suggests that the more concrete is your plan, the more likely you are to be successful.”

Make A Plan

Madrian says people should make a plan about when they’re going to open, for example, an IRA or a Roth IRA and exactly how they are going to do that. Telling friends about it, too, creates some social pressure. Research shows that helps your chances of following through.

She suggests taking all or half of your tax refund when it comes to open your first retirement account — or for that matter your first 529 college savings plan. That’s a great way to make a plan with a deadline, Madrian says.

Another issue is how much money you need to have saved up in order to open a retirement account. What’s the minimum investment?

“The good news is things have modernized tremendously,” says Stephany Kirkpatrick, a vice president at LearnVest, a low-cost online financial advice company.

Set It To Automatic

Kirkpatrick says some companies require a minimum of $1,000 or $3,000 to get started. But, she says, others have much lower minimum investments. She says that’s “more on the roboadviser side of things to enable you to put in a very minimum amount — sometimes $10 a week, $25 a month — on an automated basis.”

Kirkpatrick and Madrian both say that whatever account you set up, making the savings automatic is key. That makes your do-it-yourself IRA feel a lot more like a 401(k), Kirkpatrick says. “That’s why we like it. It’s automated. We don’t have to think about it.”

And she says that makes it much more likely we’ll keep squirreling away money each week or month. “The behavioral economics here are really key,” Kirkpatrick says.

All of the investing experts and economists we interviewed for this series also stressed the importance of finding investments with low fees. Many said you should try to keep total annual fees below 0.5 percent in any investment account (401(k), IRA, 529, etc.). There’s more information about that in our profile of investment guru Jack Bogle and our sample portfolios page.

If you want more help with all of this, you can join the NPR Your Money and Your Life Facebook group. Madrian says she’ll help nudge people to follow through on a pledge to set up smart, successful investment accounts.

Fast-food, home care, child care workers: Your advocacy is changing our country for the better. #Fightfor15 -H

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 10, 2015

I stand with the thousands of workers on strike today to demand $15 and a union. #FightFor15

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) November 10, 2015

3:46

NPR’s Scott Detrow talks with host Scott Simon about the politics, perceptions, and reality of President Obama’s move to reject the Keystone XL pipeline project.

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

The Keystone XL pipeline project has been in front of Barack Obama for most of his administration. Yesterday, President Obama said it won’t be built.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BARACK OBAMA: America’s now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change. And frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership.

SIMON: The announcement has implications for U.S. politics and also global negotiations. NPR’s Scott Detrow joins us in our studio. Scott, thanks very much for being with us.

SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Thanks for having me.

SIMON: How important is this decision to the U.S. energy resources?

DETROW: Well, I would say it’s very important and also not really important at all. The Keystone XL pipeline has become the political flashpoint when it comes to environmental and climate policy and energy policy here in the United States. Supporters have said it would create tens of thousands of jobs. Opponents of the pipeline say that the oil coming through it, going to the market, would just put the world over the top in terms of carbon dioxide that’s being emitted from energy extraction. And that overcharged debate is an issue that President Obama addressed when he made this announcement.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

OBAMA: For years, the Keystone pipeline has occupied what I, frankly, consider an overinflated role in our political discourse. It became a symbol too often used as a campaign cudgel by both parties rather than a serious policy matter.

DETROW: But because of that – because of the role that Keystone plays in the conversation, President Obama can use this decision to send a very clear message to the rest of the world – that climate implications matter a great deal when he and the United States are making decisions about energy policy.

SIMON: But realistically, isn’t in the oil already on its way?

DETROW: Yeah, that’s accurate. This oil is being extracted in Alberta. It’s going to the global market. It’s being consumed anyway. And that was an argument in favor of it. Folks were saying that this is coming by barge. It’s coming by train. Why not have it come in a pipeline that you could argue is safer and less vulnerable to spills and crashes and things like that?

SIMON: And why do you think the decision comes now? We’ll note, of course, the president doesn’t have to run for re-election anymore.

DETROW: That’s right. He doesn’t. I think he’s – you can make the argument that he’s timing this in a very symbolic way. This comes on the eve of a very important climate summit that’s going to happen in Paris. It begins later this month. And that’s the United Nations’ latest attempt to get a global game plan in place to lower carbon dioxide to address climate change.

There have been several of these summits before, and they haven’t really gone too well. And historically, the United States has kind of been the bad guy here. Historically, more emissions come from the United States than any other country. And you could view this as a way of – for President Obama to make a statement to other world leaders that this time around, the United States is going to be very serious about coming out of these negotiations with a solution and a real game plan.

SIMON: What are the significant policy issues right now?

DETROW: Well, if the Keystone XL pipeline is kind of overblown and also not critically important to the big picture energy landscape in the United States, there’s another policy that started taking place that’s kind of the opposite. It’s very important, and it’s probably going to shift the way that energy is produced in the U.S., but it doesn’t get as much attention. And that’s something called the Clean Power Plan. That is an EPA regulation that is going to require states to shift away from coal and to lower carbon sources like solar, wind power, but also a lot more natural gas in the way that big-scale utilities produce their energy. And that policy, which is in the very long process of going into a codified EPA regulation, is kind of the backbone of the plan that the United States is going to take to Paris later this month.

SIMON: NPR’s Scott Detrow, thanks so much.

DETROW: Thank you, Scott.

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3:51

Many American parents face a tug of war over trying to save enough for retirement and saving for college.

Some, like Lisa Carey, a 44-year-old high school history teacher in Tampa, Fla., and her husband, Peter, a minister, haven’t yet started saving for their three kids’ college education. (Carey joined NPR’s Your Money and Your Life Facebook group. If you’re on Facebook, you can join the group, too.)

“I find it a struggle to save really much at all. I think we’re doing decently well with retirement because I have a 403(b) through the school, and I’m good about contributing the maximum that they will match but we haven’t started saving for our kids’ college education, which sounds terrible,” she says.

But Carey is doing something right. If your employer offers to match money you put into your retirement plan, do that above all else.

“You should always contribute up to your match because that’s free money,” says Scott Weingold, a financial adviser who specializes in planning for college. Basically this is one of the best investments you could ever possibly make. You put thousands of dollars into your retirement account and immediately earn a 100 percent return on that investment because it’s a match. So it’s like burning free money not to take advantage of that.

But beyond that, are you better off putting everything you can afford into retirement savings or should a chunk of that money go into a 529 college savings plan? People wonder whether having money set aside for college hurts the family’s chance for financial aid.

“Oftentimes you hear conventional wisdom that you should save only for retirement and not save for college,” says Mark Kantrowitz, who writes books on how to pay for college. But he says for the vast majority of people, it’s good to save in a 529 plan.

“You will end up with more money for retirement if you save for college in addition to saving for retirement instead of just saving just for retirement,” Kantrowitz says.

That’s because unless you are very wealthy, if you don’t set aside money for college you or your kids will have to borrow more money. And the interest on that can get expensive — or you’ll have to pull money out of retirement savings, which is also costly.

And many people don’t understand this key point: Saving money in a 529 plan does mean colleges expect you to pay more for tuition — but not very much more.

“You’re better off saving the money,” says Sandy Baum, a higher education economist with George Washington University. She says when it comes to the amount a college expects a family to pay for tuition, the parents’ income level counts up to eight times more than an asset like the money in a college savings plan.

“If you save the money, even if it’s considered as an asset, the amount that it would reduce your aid is minimal compared to the benefit you’ll get from having saved that money,” Baum says.

At the end of the day, many parents will have to use a mix of resources: a 529 plan, some home equity, some student loans. But the takeaway is it’s a good idea to sock away a bunch of money in a 529 plan.

Plus, if you have a 529 plan, you might get grandparents to chip in with extra money. There are websites to use with kids’ birthday parties so instead of getting plastic toys and junk, guests can make contributions to a college fund.

Two quick pitfalls to avoid: Make sure you put the 529 in the parents’ name, not in the grandparents’ name. The latter can hurt you in a significant way on financial aid eligibility in the following year. And watch out for big fees that gobble up your returns in a 529 or any kind of investment account.