Slashdot Mirror
German Authorities Find Al Qaeda Plans Disguised In Porn
According to CNN, which credits Hamburg-based newspaper Die Zeit, German investigators have uncovered a trove of more than 100 Al Qaeda documents recovered from a "digital storage device" (and memory cards) which were found hidden in the underpants of Austrian citizen Maqsood Lodin, who had recently traveled to Pakistan. The documents "included an inside track on some of the terror group's most audacious plots and a road map for future operations." Among these future plots: "[S]eizing cruise ships and carrying out attacks in Europe similar to the gun attacks by Pakistani militants that paralyzed the Indian city of Mumbai in November 2008." The documents were reportedly neither in plain view nor simply encrypted, but instead steganographically embedded in a pornographic video.
They seem to love stuffing things down their pants, from bombs to porno-packed digital storage. This eventually will not turn out well for the propagation of their cause.
Of course, a terrorist group wouldn't use one of the most widely-distributed types of video to conceal information in plain sight, knowing that communication with the actual target would be concealed by the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of others downloading it.
Absent the decryption key and/or software, I can't see a solid basis for destroying this guy's life. Of course, that won't stop them. New terrorist strategy: Make everyone a terrorist by distributing encoded terrorist documents.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I'm shocked that this didn't come out 10 years ago. Scary terrorists might be hiding secret communications in internet porn. It's alarming, and racy. All you need for a good news story.
Why Bin Laden was watching porn.
I really would like to see this video, so I can become familiar with their steganographic techniques.
You know, for science.
Lets say I'll be examining this "evidence" my self. I'm not quite sure they are up to the job, and I feel I should give them a hand.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Steganographically hide sensitive information in an innocuous looking video, and then hide it in your underpants thus guaranteeing it will arouse suspicion on discovery. How stupid are these guys??
How did they come to the idea of checking the guy's porn for hidden documents?
Were they interested in the porn but found (by accident) the not-very-well-hidden documents?
Were they tipped?
Did they randomly analyse the contents?
None of these sound likely...
Buried inside them was a pornographic video called "Kick Ass" -- and a file marked "Sexy Tanja."
Several weeks later, after laborious efforts to crack a password and software to make the file almost invisible, German investigators discovered encoded inside the actual video a treasure trove of intelligence
He'll get 5 years in jail for the terrorism charges, and 10 years in jail for copyright infringement. It's would be interesting to get some more background information. Was it one of those 'vault' type encrypted USB sticks? Were the authorities not at all surprised but tipped off about the steganography, or did one of them work so hard on it because it was pr0n, but noticed some weird pixellation? In other words, if it was called "Yoga for beginners" would they have bothered?
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Great now I gotta go through 50 gig of downloaded
video to make sure it's clean.
How tiresome.
Or I could just invite the DHS to look at it. Surely they wouldn't put me into indefinite detainment for a having Al-Queda porn/documents? Nah. That's conspiracy talk.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Sounds like they bared more than just witness.
Nullius in verba
Without knowledge of the algorithm and key, with any even remotely good stego and crypto it sould be impossible to prove that anything is hidden, since good crypto looks like perfetly random data.
Even if the authorities strongly suspect that there is stego'd data, and they know the algorithm, the best they can do is extract a list of random bits corresponding to what they believe to be hidden.
If the setgo algorithm is sound, then there is no way of proving that the data source isn't just a bit noisy.
Then, there should be no way of decrypting the data, or even proving it is non-random.
Unless they used a very weak password, and the authorities new enough about the organisation to have a limited pool of crypto and stego algorithms to try.
Either that or they inferred the most likely one time pad, based on the presence of a beard and arabic sounding name on the suspect.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
...however, squirreling it away in a beer can would be heresy, and the torments of seven hells in the afterlife.
So you find some pornography files in a strange place (a guy's underwear -- maybe not that strange), and the reason you think there is some hidden message is...? Oh, yeah, you also found the steganography software that was used for encoding and decoding, and then just brute forced the passphrase (RTFA). So the fact that the memory card was in the guy's underwear is actually irrelevant -- the same thing would have happened had the card been in his wallet, backback, tablet, etc.
This is the classic warden problem, applied to terrorists.
Palm trees and 8
We all know these religious zealots hate pornography! This must mean the reason they are doing this is instead to terrorize US citizens!!! How? From now on the TSA will request all pornography in your laptop or smartphone be carefully analyzed, frame by frame, before you board your flight!!! They may simply force you to trash your smartphones, laptops and tablets just like they do with your coke!
Conspiracy Theory B:
This was hoaxed by the TSA themselves so they have legal reasons to confiscate cool looking laptops, new top of the line smart phones, and expensive tablets!
11 years later, some are calling them stupid, but given the state of the United States, their plans seemes to have worked perfectly. Homogenizing religious people as stupid or ignorant seems like a pretty dangerous thing to do.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
I can't remember the name of the film, and it was not exactly modern stenography, but the plot was the Russians were sending secret messages to and from their embedded spies in the States via a series of porno videos.
Messages were being encoded as bar code segments used to make up the wall paper behind the 'actors'
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Yeah, steganography pretty much fails when you shove the thing up in your ass. Law enforcers tend to find that suspicious.
There - fixed it for you.
Osama's wife: Do you always look at it encoded?
Osama: Well you have to. There's way too much information to decode the movie in realtime. You get used to it. I...I don't even see the blonde, brunette, and red-head. All I see is our nefarious plots. Hey, you uh... want a drink?
I've been wondering for a long time whether spam is not also a means for them to disseminate instructions in some way. It doesn't appear to come from an identifiable source, and does not seem directed at any particular recipient, but the people who expect to find something there would be able to find it.
--Udo.
Muslim kid: "Cor look at the bajungas on her..."
(Crazy fanatic dad walks in)
Crazy fanatic dad : "OH NO!!! you have been corrupted by the filthy western decadance!! "
Muslim kid : "No dad!! look im using their own flithy videos against them, by hiding cunning terrorist plans inside them!! honest!!"
Crazy fanactic dad : "Ahh good son. Well done carry on"
(Crazy fanactic dad leaves)
Muslim kid (whispers) : "sucker! heh heh "
>Their only export these days seems to be terrorism.
And the only thing you seem to post is moronic generalisations.
Go look at the tag on some of your shirts or something. Obviously the goals of the "terrorists" has been to take over textiles.
--
BMO
The "suspect" will never know ... As the "authorities" have undoubtedly discovered already.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
My god what next Televangelism?
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I prefer to keep my porn steganagraphically em bedded under my matress for easy access.
The Admin and the Engineer
Two holes at once.
Aren't you suppose to hide something in a place they would never look? What's next, trying to smuggle their plans in a box labeled donuts?
I don't want to give Al Qaeda tips but embed that stuff on slide 5 of a powerpoint presentation named Corporate Synergistics or Business Process Best Practices.
Importing porn to Germany from Pakistan is about the most suspicious thing anyone can do.
Now they get to sit around watching Al-Qaeda videos so they can keep a eye out for the naughty bits.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I need higher resolution on that tit! Enhance!
I believe the correct technical term in this context would be "Augment!"
So watching porn could protect America.
The only way I can envision this actually happening the way the story is written, is if this particular method was well-known to the law enforcement and they had already worked out all the necessary tools for detecting AND breaking the hidden container.
Otherwise, it sounds like a false flag operation to me.
That's what I think, and I'm one of those people who wants to hit conspiracy nuts most of the time. That's how obvious this sounds.
Hiding it in port is probably a great recruitment tool!!!
Pornography is counter to Islam.
So is adultery, prostitution, and drinking alcohol, but it's easy to see those prohibitions being violated every weekend in the UAE and Bahrain.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
One time I was smuggling pr0n into Germany steganographically hidden in some made up terrorist plans.
Unfortunately, I had way more porn than plans.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Both the stego and the crypto could actually be excellent and still be systematically weakened by a PEBKaC or even other layers. A few ideas off the top of my head...
Maybe the flash drive contained not only the data, but also some executable stego software (kind of like how having TrueCrypt installed, as an add-on rather than something coming in all default installs, is a way of announcing "hidden volumes very likely exist on this system").
Maybe the stego and crypto application software is excellent, but some other layer (e.g. the OS) left clues. Perhaps he occasionally updated the archive (it sounds like the movie contained multiple files), adding to it, and every time he used the stego software to write out a new file, the OS left copies of the file's previous contents sitting around in free space. (Ooh, or maybe the flash drive's own wear-levelling management: he copied the video to the drive once, then the video was updated and he copied the updated one "over" it onto the same drive -- bingo, this is my first guess as to what actually happened. I bet lots of not-necessarily-stupid people would make this mistake.) Then investigators notice two copies of the "same" video with different binary representations. Stego alert.
Maybe all the tools were perfect, but the user was an idiot. Perhaps after the guy's capture, they gave him back his flash drive and let him use a computer, and then he cooperatively typed his passphrase into the government's friendly computer, while thinking, "Muahaha, stupid infidels, now I will use this opportunity to delete my^H^H the only copy of the secret plans! I am so clever and they are so dumb!"
You can have good tools and still deploy them stupidly or use them stupidly. Or just foolishly enough, to tip your hand that you're hiding data. After that, decryption passphrase is recovered with a $10 wrench.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
*steganography. Stenography is typing court transcripts.
I find very surprising that they could find&decrypt the steganography: AFAIK, the first step is to encrypt the document and compress it, making the document "look like" a random number.
Then you mix the document with the movie..
So either the terrorists were lazy/stupid or there's something strange here: how did they find the hidden countent?
Hey, I guess that does show that they aren't all bad.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
He had the steganography tools with him, as well. These guys are a very odd mix of somewhat clever and adolescently stupid in the extreme.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Seriously, how dumb are these people? By know, I'd expect strong encryption (ie, AES, via Truecrypt or similar software) to be mainstream enough for even Pakistani cave-dvellers to know about. Why bother with an obviously inferior means of encryption?
Didn't some of the 9/11 folks hit a strip club before meeting their 72 virgins?
That sort of argument is unlikely to fly in front of a jury given all the other evidence against him. Bear in mind this wasn't just a random stop-and-search, they already suspected he was an al-Qaeda member. He tried to hide the incriminating files. Probably more that isn't in the story.
Having said that, I think this sort of story just re-inforces the general impression that the counter-terrorism apparatus is way too big for the size of the threat it presently faces. If this is the way AQ move sensitive files around, they are clearly unable to recruit members with any technical sophistication. I can easily believe intelligence agencies have got a lot better over time, not to mention ruthless and focused, but it seems that if these guys can pull off a devastating attack then basically anyone can and we may as well give up now. No need for "training in Pakistan" for those guys.
If this guy really is a terrorist and they really did recover these encoded files they wouldn't be announcing it in the news as that is irresponsible and stupid.
So why is it being announced? It should be classified.
If he really is a terrorist why announce that we know how to break their codes and read their messages?
Maybe we shouldn't have.
Home-rolled Crypto -> No Crypto. Taking a page from a certain book, if you need some information to stay secret, memorize it.
Leaving physical evidence around, however, encrypted, invites people to take a shot at it. Keeping it in your head, along with torture training (think the military has many of its recruits go through something like that, where the harder someone tortures you, the more resolute you are to not give up the information), is the only way to ensure secrecy.
Not that there aren't some people working to get around that (see the electrodes in the brain experiments going on), but given the inaccuracy of the results up until now, we're probably good for a while.
I am John Hurt.
What do they gain by announcing to the media that they decoded Al Qaeda's secret files?
Now every potential terrorist can learn what the USA is capable of or not capable of. It also alerts the terrorists using steganography in this way that the US government is onto them and this could trigger much more sophisticated methods which the US government wont be able to deal with.
So I don't see the point to it being in the media. I do understand why it's on Slashdot and I would expect to see it here but I also saw it on CNN. Generally its a very difficult problem to track down and detect terrorists and it's the job of the NSA.
And SteganStanography is the art of hiding secret messages in court transcripts.
It seems that they came up with a new plan...
Yeah, because the US didn't cause its own problems in the banking sector which hurt the rest of the economy....they may have helped it along a bit by causing a not-insignificant amount of debt fighting a war, but they're not the reason for the current economic situation by a long shot.
Gives a whole new meaning to a commando raid against al Qaida.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yes it's a victimless crime to possess anything, but the subjects of child porn photos are most certainly victims.
"Epoxy resin!" I believe that is what Patrick McGoohan found in the test valve for the torpedo tube in Ice Station Zebra.
Their they're doing there hair.
I thought steganography was the study of dinosaurs with large plates protruding from their backs and spikes on their tail?
The enemies of Democracy are
Those poor dumb fellas, they just don't understand.
Infidels will always look at porn admiring the human figure or the great complexity of face and body contortion achieved by masturbators and fornicators.
They could have been far better at keeping their secrets; Only, if they had used a picture of UBL or Muhammad Ibn `Abd Allh Ibn `Abd al-Muttalib.
No one but a Muslim would have looked, scrutinized, or been offended by those pictures and no secrets would globally known.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Now porn, like liquids on a plane, has been equated with terrorism. So anyone with porn is now a potential terrorist. The FBI must be jumping with joy. They have the perfect excuse to treat everyone as a terrorist.
At the end of the day if the law doesn't protect people and/or property, and if there isn't victim, it should not be a crime. That's pure logic, accept.
The child who is asked to engage in sexual acts for the camera would disagree about it being victimless. The distribution of child porn doesn't harm anyone, fair enough, but the demand for it is the cause of the crime, and the crime harms people, so if you make possession and distribution illegal, it will ostensibly reduce the number of children exploited. That said, criminalizing cartoon or written depictions of underage sex is a true victimless crime; and if you made that argument against those abstractions, I'd agree with you. But 'real' child porn is not a victimless crime.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
No that's the art of hiding secret messages in a South Park character...
- T
That's steganology. Steganography is drawing pictures of such dinosaurs.
What do you call the art of hiding information inside a spikey-tailed dinosaur?
The enemies of Democracy are
I knew some Saudi guys who were perfectly pious in their own country, but vacationed in Florida to booze it up and hit the titty bars.
I'm sure government is part of their motivation for some, but don't discount the main religious angle. We didn't support the theocracies of Taliban or Iran, yet there they are/were, providing funding and personnel to help kill us. We support Pakistan, and they don't like us because we support relative moderates who keep them from establishing the oppressive Taliban-like regime they want there.
This is jihad, war between the cultures. They consider us decadent infidels who must be stopped, especially since we support that big thorn in their side that they've been trying to destroy for over 50 years -- Israel.
Now they have the perfect excuse to ask for all your media devices (portable storage, tablets, notebooks, smartphones) at borders/TSA/wherever and even require that you decrypt them. You could be hidden secret terrorist plots there, think on the children.,
And if they find pirated media, they could always plant there the terrorist plots to incriminate you. You could end in Guantanamo for an illegal mp3 now.
Where can we view these video's?
This is an al-quaeda operative we're talking about here. I mean after all, they were pictures of women, not goats. The German authorities had to know something was amiss.
Putting digital storage packed with porno in his pants?
I think Al Queda needs to update their instructions, because I'm not sure that is how you use the porno.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
At the end of the day if the law doesn't protect people and/or property, and if there isn't victim, it should not be a crime. That's pure logic, accept.
The child who is asked to engage in sexual acts for the camera would disagree about it being victimless. The distribution of child porn doesn't harm anyone, fair enough, but the demand for it is the cause of the crime, and the crime harms people, so if you make possession and distribution illegal, it will ostensibly reduce the number of children exploited. That said, criminalizing cartoon or written depictions of underage sex is a true victimless crime; and if you made that argument against those abstractions, I'd agree with you. But 'real' child porn is not a victimless crime.
The demand for is isn't the cause of child molestation which is the actual crime. Children would be molested whether it were filmed or not. Just like the demand of rotten.com hasn't resulted in a spike in murders.
I never said the production of child porn doesn't produce the victim. I'm saying the viewing of child porn doesn't create any victims. Possession of child porn doesn't indicate that the person possessing it is the maker of it and if they aren't making it then in that case they are arrested for having gross thoughts rather than for victimizing anyone.
Think about it. An intelligence agency gets a 'treasure trove' of information and then tells the world that they found it ... oh, and it was hidden in a most compromising way that discredits the religious credibility of the purported religious fanatics.
Think: when the Allies during World War II broke the German codes, did they tell everyone they had? NO. They kept quiet about it and used the information against the UNSUSPECTING enemy. If they had done otherwise, the Germans would have changed their coding methods and the Allies would have been deprived of all that intelligence. Get it?
So if a US intelligence agency really had such information, they wouldn't be telling anybody ... kind of like they never told anyone that they knew exactly where Bin Laden was.
If I hadn't already done so, I would lose all faith in CNN's reporting ... or propaganda.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
LOL, that's what you get for thinking "Windows 2009" was real.
Like Windows 97.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
If you cut the demand, you cut the supply.
Since the supply side involves horrendous abuse by perverted sickos who are undeterred by even life without parole (which is mandatory in many cases for these crimes), cutting off the demand and thus removing the incentive for the supply to exist could help reduce the horrible victimization that occurs.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
It revictimizes that person having such a horrible perverted picture of them out there - they are hurt everytime it is reproduced..
Here is for a less emotionally charged example: If one's SSN got on the Internet, each time one more person got a hold of it it (potentally) would result in further harm.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I just find it interesting that the movie they mentioned as the steganographic carrier, Kick Ass, is referred to as pornography. Granted, the female super hero in the movie, Hit Girl, is a 12-year old, so the movie had a pedophile (technically ephebophile) vibe to it, but I didn't see anyone getting f*cked in the movie. Shot, stabbed, and beaten up, but no sex.
Did they discover the steganography.
Followed by:
German Interrogation Technique:
Germans: Ha! You call that porn? Make him watch some German stuff for a few hours!
Al Qaeda: No more! I'll tell you everything!
It revictimizes that person having such a horrible perverted picture of them out there - they are hurt everytime it is reproduced..
Here is for a less emotionally charged example: If one's SSN got on the Internet, each time one more person got a hold of it it (potentally) would result in further harm.
It revictimizes that person having such a horrible perverted picture of them out there - they are hurt everytime it is reproduced..
Here is for a less emotionally charged example: If one's SSN got on the Internet, each time one more person got a hold of it it (potentally) would result in further harm.
That may be the case and perhaps distribution should be a crime but distribution is not the same as possession.
Also I don't think a picture is the same as a SSN. You have a slight argument but only in the case of someone putting those pictures on a website or on a P2P service and distributing them. You also have the 4chan problem where people upload anything to and people who just stumble upon it will pick it up.
How far can you take censorship?
Talent.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?