Slashdot Mirror
Police Find Paris Attackers Coordinate Via Unencrypted SMS (techdirt.com)
schwit1 writes: In the wake of the tragic events in Paris last week encryption has continued to be a useful bogeyman for those with a voracious appetite for surveillance expansion. Like clockwork, numerous reports were quickly circulated suggesting that the terrorists used incredibly sophisticated encryption techniques, despite no evidence by investigators that this was the case. These reports varied in the amount of hallucination involved, the New York Times even having to pull one such report offline. Other claims the attackers had used encrypted Playstation 4 communications also wound up being bunk.
O RLY?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Because terrorists use SMS we should monitor all SMS traffic. Because they use phones we should record all conversations. Because they use the Internet we should monitor all traffic. Because they drive cars, fly planes, and buy things at grocery stores.. we should monitor those too. In fact since terrorists use essentially everything non-terrorists use... then we should monitor everything. Put camera's in washroom stalls just in case the terrorists find a way to use them. Force people to wear microphones just in case they are terrorists. If you have done nothing wrong what do you have to worry about? Are you some kind of terrorist sympathizer? Let me mark down your objections on my suspect review and no fly list.
Only monitoring everything will free us from the threat of tyranny once and for all. Complete and total control of everything by government officials is true freedom.
Remember when Saddam had some complex masterplan for building chemical and nuclear weapons? And Al Qaeda were criminal masterminds? Now it is ISIL (The Tiny Penises) that have sophisticated methods that only our authorities can figure out if you give them unlimited powers.
I feel that this terror threat is vastly over-stated. Saddam was not a really threat (a little but not that much). Al Qaeda weren't really a threat (sure they killed people, but hardly enough to roll over your way of life for), and now The Tiny Pensis are a threat (no they aren't).
To put it in perspective, the Police in the US have killed more civilians this year than The Tiny Penises have in France.
Terrorists are shitty humans, but it's not enough to give up for freedom and privacy for.
police have found that the terrorists breathed air, drank water, and wore clothes in order to carry out their attacks. Police and security agencies have united in calling for these things to be banned immediately.
Of course they lie. This isn't about protecting you. Even after this revelation, watch them step up their attacks against crypto and privacy.
"Police Find Paris Attackers Coordinate Via Unencrypted SMS". And where's the article to support that headline?!
It really wouldn't be hard to use the in game functions of any military themed shooter game to set up an an attack.
Essentially, in game people are already talking about shooting people and targets, that even unencrypted it would be painfully difficult to filter through all the chats - supposing you had access to them - to figure out which players were talking about playing the game, and who would be planning something in real life.
Quite scary
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
The logic of authoritarians:
Thanks to Snowden's revelations, terrorists started using unbreakable encryption!!!!!!!
Right. Except they didn't.
That was pre-Snowden. Terrorists didn't know about encryption before that.
Right again. Except they did.
So, you see-- Snowden has "blood on his hands" for making terrorists aware of encryption, which they knew about for decades, so they could use it, which they didn't. And thank goodness for that, because if they had used encryption, the attacks might have been successful, which they were.
Got it.
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I realize you're going to get modded into invisibility. But before that happens, I want to say that I believe there's a lot more to the whole ISIS/Daesh story than meets the eye.
I'm old enough to remember when people thought MK-Ultra was just some conspiracy theorists dark fantasy. I mean, how could our government be using hallucinogenics to experiment on people for the purposes of mind control? When it turned out to be true, the story changed to, "Oh that. That was a long time ago, right?" When it turns out that some rather notable mass murderers turned out to have been subjects of MK-Ultra, the story changed back to, "Oh, that's just a conspiracy theory."
When something in the news happens and all you can say is, "What the fuck?!", sometimes you should ask yourself, what indeed, the fuck is going on.
You are welcome on my lawn.
We couldn't intercept them without encryption, imagine if they had used any!
It seems to me that when you're planning to blow yourself up anyway - you're probably not that worried about getting caught after the fact, and there's so much traffic going around that open communications especially if using a simple codewords for obvious trigger phrases (so say "flowers' instead of "bombs" etc...) and very likely the best the intelligence folks will do is read your comms after you've succeeded and have gone to meet your 72 Virgins....
The Digital Sorceress
This war on encryption and personal privacy can't be won by the ordinary man against governments.
It's inevitable. They will get their way.
I take personal comfort in seeing a repeating cycle in history where they can only legislate once the genie is out of the bottle, and they are slow to react.
A basic lack of understanding of technology, by those in power, and technology's ability to evolve outside of their constraints means that they are really just sowing the seeds for the next big thing after the internet - it's replacement.
Peer to peer communications, not network based would be my guess.
How? I dunno, but when forced into a corner we always find a way out.
So now we know for sure which are the propaganda mills in "mainstream" news. I read anti-encryption articles on at least CNN, MSN, Fox, and Infoworld. Are there any others worthy of mention in this context? They are now off my list of "reputable news" sources, though they may be useful for staying up on current events... take it with a grain of salt.
The BBC: Paris attacks: Silicon Valley in crosshairs over encryption
Some gems from the article:
"And I do think this is a time for particularly Europe, as well as here in the United States, for us to take a look and see whether or not there have been some inadvertent or intentional gaps that have been created in the ability of intelligence and security services to protect the people that they are asked to serve."
while attitudes towards creating government backdoors were "hostile", that atmosphere "could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement". Paris may just be that event.
Also, some jackwagon New York prosecutor is calling for legislation mandating phone manufactures use weak encryption and provide backdoors for law enforcement:
A New York prosecutor is calling for federal legislation to weaken smartphone encryption
It's just ridiculous. Intelligence agencies and police have unprecedented data and location tracking on nearly every person in the world and it's STILL NOT ENOUGH for them. They will never be satisfied, even if every person in the world provided them a 24/7 video feed they would demand constant brainwave scans to "protect our children". It's time to say enough is enough and remove the people in favor of a surveillance state from a position of power, either by voting them out of office or voting the people who appointed them out of office.
Enigma
James "Whitey" Bulger and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski are the two most famous. There is also evidence that Sirhan Sirhan and Charles Manson were subjects. And the doofus who shot John Lennon. A lot of information came out in the Church Committee hearings, but by then the CIA had already destroyed a lot of the records. Fortunately, enough documentation and testimony of participants and "researchers" survived to give a very good idea of MK-Ultra, how it worked and what they were using it for.
I went for years thinking that the whole thing was just a myth. The evidence is pretty clear, though. The program was real and went on for decades.
There's also a very interesting back story about how many of the original researchers died in suspicious circumstances in the year following the Church Committee hearings.
It's one of those "open secrets" like the fact that the Reagan Administration paid and allowed drug cartels to flood the inner cities with crack cocaine to fund anti-Communist death squads in Central and South America. You ask most people and they're like, "Nah, that can't be true." But true it is. And not Alex Jones True, but real life true.
You are welcome on my lawn.
When the drug dealer started sending MMS images of clocks?
It seems entirely reasonable that you could plan just about anything with plain text SMS. It wouldn't be hard to talk about whatever it was in plain language substituting normal activities like going shopping or whatever.
An innocuous code would be impossible to decode if you didn't suspect the people in question. You'd never filter out the 373738483847 other texts that were about mundane activities.
effective alternatives to mass survailence and bulk data collection
Courage. The outcomes are far superior.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Sadly, Al Jazeera is one of the best sources of international news.
Learn to love Alaska
They need to explain why the massive global surveillance failed to stop the attacks and the reasons they came up with is Snowden and encryption. This is despite their own reports that showed their massive surveillance to not be effective against terrorism even before Snowden and widespread encryption. Big-Data is great for statistical analysis, if is not very useful for spear-fishing.
"Or are you saying that only first world, western lives count?"
I am sorry, but when determining the territorial security of country (laws, police intervention) only what happen in that country should count. Citing that some terrorist in some country somewhere should make us drop our law , trample our constitution, and roll over the ground wailing, is stupid. Were you there to claim the genocidial Rwanda event should lead to some police change in the US/France/Whichever ? No ? then ISIL is no different.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org