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Paris Attacks Would Not Have Happened Without Crypto (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes with a story at Ars Technica, citing a Yahoo News interview, that National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers has explicitly blamed the terrorist attacks which struck Paris last November on communications backed by strong crypto. From the article:
Because of encrypted communications, he said, "we did not generate the insights ahead of time. Clearly, had we known, Paris would not have happened."
Rogers did not explicitly re-launch the campaign waged by FBI director James Comey to force technology companies to provide a "golden key" to encrypted communications. Rogers called encryption "foundational to our future" and added that arguing over encryption backdoors was "a waste of time." But he did say that encryption was making the job of the NSA and law enforcement more difficult.
The interview comes shortly after the FBI won an order requiring Apple to provide technical means to bypass the security measures preventing them from unlocking the iPhone 5C belonging to Syed Rizwan Farook. Farook, along with his wife, are responsible for the December mass shooting in San Bernardino, California."
It's not quite that simple. There's an apocryphal story that right after the Cold War ended, senior officials from the KGB and CIA met one night for drinks and got to talking about their espionage exploits. The CIA people said how easy it must've been for the KGB to infiltrate an open society like the U.S. Able to blend in with the population, travel freely, and get access to documents while posing as regular citizens. The KGB people said on the contrary it was extraordinarily difficult. While the U.S. secrets were mostly all out there, they were mixed in with an ocean of tabloid and conspiracy publications an open society produces. They had to waste tremendous resources trying to figure out of that National Enquirer story about the U.S. having captured aliens and their UFO was made up, or if there really was some truth behind it.
That's what you have to deal with with open publications. Yeah western inellignece can read Dabiq. But ISIS also knows that they can read it. Thus it becomes a perfect platform for feeding western intelligence agencies disinformation. Anything that's openly published that way has to be taken with a huge grain of salt unless it's corroborated by other intelligence. The reason why intelligence agencies are so desperate to break crypto is because if you're encrypting something, you're presumably doing so because it contains information you don't want foreign intelligence agencies to read. Thus it is precisely the type of stuff intelligence agencies want to be able to read.
That's not to say we should roll over and let NSA put backdoors in everything. If they get that, then ISIS knows and can start poisoning their encrypted communications with disinformation, while pulling their real communication behind a higher level of encryption. No, in order for what the NSA wants to work, they would have to insert backdoors but also keep those backdoors secret from the public. My best guess is the western intelligence agencies are raising the spectre of backdoors in encryption software they know they can't break, in the hopes it scares groups like ISIS into using different encryption tools. Perhaps ones they can already break. Or maybe ISIS will try to write their own encryption software, which is notoriously difficult and can easily result in flaws which can be exploited by intelligence agencies to help them crack it.