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.
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.
We should ban all communication devices that terrorists might use, including pigeons
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.
Ban all telephones, because if we don't, terrorists might kill us.
Jews did WTC and Paris.
9/11 was an inside job (mossad)
catpcha: robbery
and love Microsoft.
The minister gave no source for this conclusion or any information, really -- or at least Quartz didn't report any). As it is, he's speaking out his pie-hole.
Do they? Do they really?
We're expected to believe that terror cells are importing big heavy expensive embargo'd PS4s and games in order to chat on a likely unencrypted and easily tappable by Sony/EA/whoever channel?
Pull the other one. They're clearly going to be using a TAILS USB stick and the apps that come with it, at the lower levels.
Higher ones? Couriers, handwritten paper, for-your-ears-only whispers.
With all the spying on its citizens, the governments are still clueless!
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.
Taxpayers should pay us to play video games instead,
yours truly,
homeland security
Terrorists have attacked again. Drop your freedoms and bend over.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Belgium simply doesn't have enough manpower to monitor all potential jihadists. It has the largest number of muslim citizens to go fight in Syria per capita out there. I imagine you could automate most of the monitoring of chats etc online, but when you need to monitor group audio sessions with dozens of participants in a pool of maybe millions of gamers. How do you manage something like that ?
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.
Communicating plans to commit evil deeds isnt the problem, its actually carrying them out that is the problem. In fact the more people these extremists communicate with about there plans the more likely someone will be able to talk them out of it.
But i guess the politicians will bring in more extreme laws in an effort to make people free of extremists....
All video games are now tools of terror and anyone owning or using one can be arrested immediately and detained indefinitely without charge.
It started based on one overheard comment: "we go to ambus' em and kill all da f***tards"
N/T
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Because in your typical frag-fest there is a lot of innocuous talk about killing off some other folk. Blend right in etc
Seriously? Who didn't expect something like this eventually.
I pictured this possibility to pass information all the way back in the 1990s.
Remembered thinking about how it would be easy for someone to start up their own password protected quake 2 servers where you uploaded your custom characters to the other players, than just had the message in the textures for the players.
Or during Counter Strike Source with your custom tags. Also thought about having my tag set to an animated gay porn picture and standing in front of it so anyone who tried to shoot me was stuck looking a hardcore gay porn to do it. Or an animated tag of lots of my character scrolling past making really hard to target me from the wallpaper.
If you have point to point communication, traffic analysis can easily detect the participants of a network. If you have a central server with lots of uninvolved people, you either need to get the information from the server or rely on timing analysis. The timing is useless with asynchronous communication and can be obfuscated by introducing delays.
You're an inhuman little douchepot. You don't give a damn about terrorisim unless it involves the death of Americans? #frenchlivesdon'tmatter #britishlivesdon'tmatter #onlyamericanlivesmatter #i'mafuckingxenophobewhocaresfornooneoutsidemycozylittleworld #jewishlivesdon'tmatter #ragheadlivesdon'tmatter #onlydouchebagslikemematter
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Within hours after the attacks in Paris, Belgium raided multiple sites, and arrested a number of suspected accomplices.
They have the ability to monitor, what they lack is the balls to act on their intelligence. Better to wait until an attack goes down, then arrest the conspirators, than to use the intelligence proactively.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The attackers did not yell "God is great!". They yelled "Allah is great!"
The two are not equivalent. The latter reveals pertinent information about the terrorists' beliefs.
Why is such crap even given airplay?
We must relinquish our freedoms to defend freedom in the name of freedom!
Game console chat, even if it was monitored by various authorities, has the extra obscuration for terrorist planning something of the noise of various first person shooters. There is already plenty of legitimate in game talk about bombs, firearms, killing people, paramilitary tactics etc. that it would be much more difficult to spot a terrorist group talking about a real plan to carry out a real act with keyword searching.
There are build by an evil Corporation anyway.
As someone loving democracy and post-enlightenment society, the incompetence of those polit-talheads is absolutely -- nearly physically -- painful.
I think we should enhance democratic ruling: every democrat should, for once in their lives have the right to smack one of those talking heads of their choice in the face (provided said talking head has had one of those *duh* fuckups). Publically.
And you think they're harmlessly playing Call of Duty?
No, no. They're training on how to be more effective terrorists.
Better ban video games just to be safe.
Gaming chats have been used for long time for "non-gaming" activities such as this.
you think they are not monitoring major chat channels in games?
Ofcourse they are, they have been watching the internet since day 1, and you only got your panties in a twist only recently when they admitted it.
Did anyone ever use radios instead of teamspeak or other voice chat software during a CoD (or whatever) session? Quite scary for anyone listening in...
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.
Have we found a way to tack yet another shooting on games. I'm impressed, I thought you couldn't steer this one towards the bad, evil games of murder, but leave it to our politicians to find a way.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just yesterday I noticed that when I entered something in the comment field of an address in my gmail account, the entry was almost instantly mirrored in the comment field for that address on my phone.
It occurred to me that this phenomenon could be exploited for rapid and private communications, then the address and it's associated comments could be deleted at the end of the conversation. This requires both parties to the conversation to share access to a common gmail account.
From the 80s though. Got into management and politics after awhile.
PlayStation 4 is always a good place for the investigators to concentrate their energies on.
Not good enough for terrorists; not good enough for you.
In some of these multiplayer games you could also just run around and use the player movement and/or weapons fire as a covert channel to send a low bit-rate of data that gets recorded and decoded on the other end. Imagine someone using the in-game pistol and shotgun for the dots and dashes of Morse code, or changing direction or speed of travel as a semaphore. That hyperactive player that seems to randomly bounce around the other team members might be the virtual radio man performing an interpretive dance. You could also encode symbols as positions in the game grid. Run to spot A, take cover. Run to spot B, take cover. Other players can observe this from a distance without necessarily showing that they are really communicating, like the cold-war stories of putting a mark or object in a public place to signal a predetermined message.
This Belgian minister is unfortunately not a stupid idiot. He just has a different goal than we do: this isn't about catching terrorists but about trying to drum up support for increased government surveillance.
Then luckily it's all in Belgium. A country where government and regulation seem optional, to the point that the country essentially did without a government for almost 2 years at one point in time.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Sounds like some police just want an excuse to buy some Playstation 4's just prior to Star Wars battlefront coming out...
"Sorry sarge, we're too busy today 'monitoring' Playstation 4 to do any other work, I'm afraid we'll probably be at it pretty constantly for the immediate future..."
if you see something, pwn something
It is quite irritating to see that every time they manage to put the screws to terrorists, or white-collar criminals or whomever, the cops, FBI, Homeland Security et al show, just how, smart they are in using such clever means to cat h their prey. Good going, guys. Now these cretins know that they shouldn't use PlayStation to communicate any more and will find some other pipeline with which to converse. Maybe you might have just kept mum about what you discovered? Yes, we would not have known just how friggin' clever and resourceful you are, but then maybe we just might have found it a lot easier to happen upon the next terrorist cabal.
Direct democracy doesnâ(TM)t work at any scale.
The pure direct democracy Switzerland begs to differ.
The United States founding fathers were correct in that the biggest threat to any populace is its own government.
...if this government has power.
If the government's only role is to organise things, and the final say for any decision is taken with democratic vote (ie.: nearly every single law gets voted by the general population before acceptance), the government can't pass any stupid or oppressive law.
(Unless the majority of the population is dumb enough to approve it. That can happen occasionnally. But in a country where the general population is happy - thanks to good welfare and good economy - and educated, it tends to be rare)
When any segment of society looses fundamental rights, no ones rights are safe.
So put all the segments of society in charge, and be done with it.
Or do you prefer to still concentrate all the decision power in a few elect ?
And then have the general population running constantly armed with deadly force in order to be ready to kill any rogue elect (and risking killing each other in the process. a lot)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]