Privacy advocates, technologists and businesses including Apple have criticized the Australian bill and similar proposals elsewhere, saying such a plan would introduce portals for government abuse and malicious hackers alike.

The "Going Dark" debate continued in a speech at a Georgetown University law conference.

Signal says it's beta testing a feature to encrypt the "envelope" as well as the letter it contains.

Despite significant improvements to government website encryption, some metadata is still transmitted insecurely, the Oregon Democrat said.

The standards agency commissioned a study of how much the Advanced Encryption Standard meant to government and industry since the late '90s.

The new feature is especially noteworthy because of Skype's past reputation for allowing outside access in certain cases.