Slashdot Mirror
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.
same can be said for cops shooting people, or colleges "not acting" in relation to race. or (insert other buzz worthy topics of the day)
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Either this information is false, or the Belgian minister is an idiot. If we can track them on a single platform, it would be dumb to let them know, because they will move somewhere else. It would also be dumb to tell them that it is hard for authorities to monitor if that was actually true. So I assume this is all false information disseminated as a deception.
Actually, game-chat would probably be a good (for them) way to hide certain types of planning. I'm not saying it's true, but for a modern shooter or perhaps FPS, they could simply substitute "game" targets for real-life ones, and otherwise the conversation might sound much you would hear in some games.
OK, so sneak your infiltrator into the enemy Science Centre. There will be about 3 guards in positions X, Y, and Z. Group B will take them out, then you delivery the package by 14:00. Meanwhile group C enter the mass relay by 13:50, and take out all present. Group A will attempt to take out enemy power infrastructure and cause confusion at 13:30.
Maybe some of it would sound like weird BS, but would *you* suspect that some of the weird guys in CoD were actually plotting nefarious things in real life? Some of the shit that trolls said might be a good cover too, as most sane people either mute them or just ignore it. As a mid-level gamer I'm not sure I could tell the difference between a real-life nutball and the online nutball variety.
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.
It is counter intuitive, but encryption can actually make you more visible. NSA eavesdropping or not, the vast majority of people communicating on the internet still does not bother with encryption or uses something the NSA is known to be able to crack like HTTPS (well up to a point anyway). So if you are looking for a bunch of terrorist, start tracking the flow of encrypted signals traffic coming out of the Middle East starting with countries like Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan that are adjacent to Syria/Iraq and start with the most heavily encrypted traffic because that's most likely their boss relaying his orders and then just wait to see where the encrypted data ends up. You don't necessarily have to crack the messages just see where they end up. Once you know that you can start scratching the recipients off your list one by one. The FBI has caught blackmailers and hackers this way, they were the only ones generating heavily encrypted comms in some area. This kind of signals intelligence analysis is also why Al Qaeda resorted to using couriers carrying encrypted USB keys which worked pretty well for Bin Laden until he finally got sloppy after 11 years of successfully staying off the radar.
This makes complete sense. It's kind of a steganography, putting their data in where it can't be separated out easily or flagged because it blends in with the rest of it.
Direct democracy doesnâ(TM)t work at any scale. The problem is that any grouping of people will take steps to exclude people from the group. This means that *any* group of people will oppress a smaller group given the opportunity. The problem is worsened when the oppressing group is large enough to offer some degree of anonymity. This has been proven to be an enabler for all of the worst kinds of human behaviour. The United States founding fathers were correct in that the biggest threat to any populace is its own government.
The fundamental goal of any moral government has to be the defense of the rights of the people, even when those right cost the greater whole. When any segment of society looses fundamental rights, no ones rights are safe.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted