French authorities have found a mobile phone near the Bataclan concert hall with a map of the music venue and a text message on it saying words to the effect of "let's go," a source with knowledge of the investigations told Reuters on Tuesday. Confirming reports on French investigative website Mediapart and US news channel CNN, the source said the phone was found in a dustbin near the Bataclan, where 89 of the 129 people killed in the attacks on Friday were shot dead. US lawmakers meanwhile said it was likely that new, difficult to break "end-to-end" encryption technologies had been used by individuals in Belgium, France and Syria in plotting the attacks, which were claimed by the Islamic State terror group. "We can't tell you today specifically that they were using a specific encrypted platform [but] we think that's a likely communication tool because we didn't pick up any direct communication [before the attacks]," Republican Senator Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Tuesday. Hawkish lawmakers like Burr, and a number of intelligence officials, seized on the attacks to argue that they illustrate the dangers of increasing encryption. "I think it's safe to say that there are 30 end-to-end encrypted software packages that you can download for free. And, given the fact that between iTunes and PlayStation, the number of apps that are added on a weekly and monthly, yearly basis, and I think we anticipate that everything from this point forward will have an encrypted communications to it," Burr said. "Now's the time for us to act." Burr said the committee was far from developing legislation to address the issue, and that it was trying determine the options that are available and then would decide the best course, short, medium and long-term. Push for ‘backdoor' snooping Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, said he would not be surprised if it were ultimately shown that encrypted communications had been used by the perpetrators of the Paris attacks. "We know that ISIS instructs their operatives to move from social media, once they're recruited people, to those applications where they can encrypt," Schiff said on cable network CNN. Intelligence agencies have long warned that the rise of encrypted email, chat and phone platforms has made it more difficult to track suspicious activity. Senior Obama administration officials have pushed to allow for so-called "backdoors" that would give intelligence agents a way to access encrypted communications. Privacy advocates, technology companies and security researchers generally oppose such vulnerabilities, warning that any weakness built in for law enforcement could also expose information to foreign nation states and malicious hackers. Many technology companies, including Apple Inc and Google, have made encryption a default setting in their products, a trend spurred in part by the 2013 Edward Snowden revelations about government surveillance. Burr said he did not expect much cooperation from tech companies on the encryption issue, but he said they may not have a choice if national security is the issue. "If it means that people are going to have to change their business model, then so be it," Burr said.
