Belgian Home Affairs Minister: Terrorists Communicate Via PlayStation 4 (qz.com)

bricko writes with story at Quartz reporting the words of Belgium's home affairs minister Jan Jambon, who says that ISIL operators communicate using their PlayStation 4s; "which allows terrorists to communicate with each other and is difficult for the authorities to monitor. 'PlayStation 4 is even more difficult to keep track of than WhatsApp,' he said. The gaming console also was implicated in ISIL's plans back in June, when an Austrian teen was arrested for downloading bomb plans to his PS4." This seems a strange place to concentrate investigators' energies; terrrorists could be communicating in the chat session on the side of many social media games, too, or by any number of other means; Jambon would do well to read through some of the movie plotlines that Bruce Schneier has gathered.

Comments

Re:Clueless.

[MadMaverick9]

And afterwards "they" always say: oh yes, we had this guy on our watchlist.

So - then fucking do something with that information!!!

Do-it-themselves

[Todd Knarr]

Why would any sane terrorist use any sort of service run by someone else? That just makes them vulnerable. Any sort of PC, install Linux and set up their own private XMPP server, instant fully-encrypted communications without leaving any logs or other traces on anyone else's systems where the authorities could get access to them. And with the authorities' current focus on social media it adds the additional layer of security of not being where anyone's looking for them to be. Geesh, I think government officials have been reading too many best-seller spy novels and listening to too few tech geeks.

Re:Do-it-themselves

[MacTO]

More to the point, setting up a secure communications network requires technological know-how. While almost everyone uses some form of encrypted communications, very few people have the means to assess how secure those communications are. The end result is that the whole system is based upon trust. We trust that the underlying encryption algorithms are secure. We trust that the software that implements those algorithms is secure. We trust that the people who generate certificates are trustworthy. We trust that the means of distributing and verifying certificates is secure. We trust that everyone in the chain knows what they are doing so that a simple misconfiguration doesn't diminish the value of the whole system. And that is before you consider malice.

Create your own network, and red flags are raised. The people responsible for investigating those networks are going to look at each potential weakness in the chain, and exploit them if they can.

Re:for the love of god

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to have forgotten that the Internet spans the entire world. And that many /. readers are not from the USA.

while I agree that the news coverage on the subject is often a bit excessive in some regards I strongly disagree with your apparent position that the 127 people who died in France yesterday and the hundreds of others who die every month elsewhere in the world don't matter because they are not American.

and FYI I am an American, I just have a broader world view than you have demonstrated.

Re:LOL

[Feral Nerd]

We should ban all communication devices that terrorists might use, including pigeons

I know you are trying to be sarcastic but no, we should fire politicians who go on interviews and give away our knowledge of the nature terrorist communications for being stupid idiots. A few years ago some Bush White House functionary proudly announced to the media that a prominent Al Qaeda figure had been located by tracking his satellite phone signal. An hour later all of the Al Qaeda chatter went silent and with it the signals intelligence. It is almost always more useful to sit and listen to these bozos talk than it is to block their comms or brag about what you know about their comms in the media.

Re:for the love of god

[TWX]

can we get 1 article not about terrorism? Something like 30 Americans have died from terrorism in the past 5 years. You're far more likely to die by slipping in your bathtub. The news coverage on terrorism is INSANELY blown out of proportion. I'd be fine not seeing another one for the rest of this decade.

At least this article has a technical angle, albeit a strange one. Throughout history entities have sought to keep their communications secret. At times obscurity was the order of the day, at other times cryptography was the method of choice, and sometimes a combination of the two are used.

Now that it's pointed out I'm not all that surprised that this kind of Internet-based medium would be used; it's specialized enough to be easily overlooked and given the nature of what's said on gaming systems during gameplay that there might not be much desire on the part of the operator of the proprietary system to monitor or even log communications. Of course, a downside, playing devil's advocate, is that if the operator of the system is logging, even if only to be able to address abuse after the fact, they might be able to comb through communications and uncover the participants, their IP addresses and possibly a degree of geolocation, plus any discussed plots including those that might not have been carried-out.

One of the things that kind of bothers me is that in this era of so much spying, including the very likely state of warrantless surveillance, that we've had high profile examples where that questionable system has failed. We had a fake expert on terrorism that lied about his credentials for many years. We've had cases of American domestic terrorism and mass-shootings that were publicized in advance by the shooters that were not uncovered or stopped. We've had cases of international terrorism in Western nations that were not uncovered. Clearly this spying is not only questionable in its legitimacy, but it's not even effective. Proponents can't claim that all of this spying on us, all of this expense and the chilling effects of known surveillance aren't even making us safer, so it's a net-negative.

Re:Either this is false or they are idiots

[geoskd]

Edward Snowden is a sainted genius for doing the EXACT SAME THING, only FAR, FAR more and worse.

Snowden is praised because he revealed the mass invasion of privacy against individuals who are not terrorists and have no affiliation with terrorists.

Mass surveillance is bad because sooner or later, the government becomes the terrorist, and the ultimate goal is to lay the groundwork in advance so that removing these tyrants is as bloodless and painless as possible. Mass surveillance, and the disarming of the populace are measures taken to make it easier for those in power to stay in power. We need to take any and all actions reasonable to ensure that those in power remain rightfully fearful of the governed masses. When they no longer fear the power of the people, the corruption begins. It doesn't take very long after that for the human rights abuses, and ultimately outright tyranny in its worst incarnations.

Power

[DrYak]

We need to take any and all actions reasonable to ensure that those in power remain rightfully fearful of the governed masses.

Or you know, you could begin by not giving that much power to the government.
There's this small thing called "direct democracy" (= where it is the actual people who have the final say on everything. Not some representatives, but the general population). You should try it sometimes.

Oh, and please no dummy complaints that "it only works in very small territories". Come on. It's 2015. We're in the Internet Age.