NYT Quietly Pulls Article Blaming Encryption In Paris Attacks

HughPickens.com writes: Inside Sources reports that the NY Times has quietly pulled a story from its website alleging the attackers used encrypted technology. The original piece, which has since been removed, can be found on the Internet Archive. It stated, "The attackers are believed to have communicated using encryption technology, according to European officials who had been briefed on the investigation but were not authorized to speak publicly. It was not clear whether the encryption was part of widely used communications tools, like WhatsApp, which the authorities have a hard time monitoring, or something more elaborate. Intelligence officials have been pressing for more leeway to counter the growing use of encryption."

A link to the NY Times article now redirects readers to a separate, general article on the attacks, which does not contain the word "encrypt." The Times later posted a second article citing an anonymous "European counterterrorism official" who was quoted saying authorities' "working assumption is that these guys were very security aware," but clarified officials "offered no evidence."

Comments

Eh.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

This sort of 'reporting' is a farce, of which they really ought to be ashamed. Aside from the dubious wisdom of parroting 'unnamed intelligence sources who definitely wouldn't have any reason to be spinning the media after a dramatic and gruesome attack on their watch'; there's a pretty aching gap in even basic critical thinking if you treat 'the working assumption is that the guys were pretty security aware' as some sort of insight.

FFS, any pot dealer who has stayed out of prison for a couple of years would count as 'pretty security aware' in the vacuous "well, we didn't realize that they were up to something until they had already executed it" sense of the term. Of course some degree of care was used in orchestrating a coordinated attack involving a number of people, some of who had had run-ins with the law before. Why would you expect otherwise?

Plus, historical examples suggest that terrorists aren't complete morons about security: Al Qaeda and the Taliban both had a healthy distrust of cellphones, even before we learned what 'dirtboxing' was; and the guys who pulled the Mumbai attacks in 2008 used Blackberries specifically because BBM is way more resistant than SMS. I realize that somebody had a burning need to fill column inches; but what pitiful dreck.

Re:The hilarity it keeps growing.

[phishybongwaters]

I personally read these articles to find the name of the apps they say are "hard to monitor" and make sure I in no way ever use them. Think about this long and hard. Why would they tell "them" exactly what apps to use because they can't monitor them? They wouldn't. But.... they sure as hell would like to direct as many people as possible to use the apps that have easy access to, namely any app that appears by name in any of these articles. Hell, they even tried to blame snowden.