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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."
They keep trying, however the true fact remains no encryption was used by these terrorists.
I thought the reason the French police were able to find the attacker's apartments, accomplices, and so on very quickly was because the attackers used regular unencrypted methods of communication, such as SMS?
#DeleteChrome
Mohammed Atta et al weren't using encrypted communications, just AOL and flip phones. Yet the TLA's totally screwed the pooch on 9/11.
A .125 batter can't keep blaming the bat forever.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
The Paris attacks wouldn't have happened without crypto? That's a funny way to spell "Islam."
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Bullshit. The Paris attackers did not use encrypted communications.
Was this an intelligence failure? Possibly. Was it an intelligence failure due to a lack of backdoors and/or laws against cryptography? Absolutely not.
Thomas Galvin
because how else could the attackers have been in so many places at once. Magic? Jet Packs?!?!? Why it's the Car's that they drove to those locations that enabled them to murderate all those people. If we would just get rid of all cars in Paris this would never happen again.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Even if that were true (and I'd argue it isn't), the attacks also wouldn't have happened without long distance communications. So lets just get rid of them as well in the name of security, up to and including postal mail.
What? You say that long distance communications have an intrinsic utility that vastly dwarfs their occasional role in illegal behavior? You don't say.
Maybe if you had, you know, invested in more HUMINT the Paris attacks wouldn't have happened.
FTA: Rogers' claims about Paris contradict the information that came out of France following the attacks. There were claims by former US intelligence officials that encrypted communications had been used by the Islamic State affiliated terrorists in the immediate wake of the attacks. But those claims were largely dismissed by French authorities when they looked at the actual communications on devices recovered from the group. According to statements from French law enforcement, the attackers had used standard SMS messages to communicate—not encrypted messaging apps on smartphones. http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
Syed Rizwan Farook: political power grab to set a precedent for forcing manufacturers to decrypt the private data of their customers. both shooters are dead. their motive and operation are both known. we're chasing ghosts to advance an agenda.
attacks which struck Paris last November: are the result of a determined minority of disenfranchised extremists with nothing left to lose. a 65 year policy of proxy wars and foreign backed government coups to install lifelong dictators has left them jaded and dead inside. these are truly desperate people, clinging to $diety for some hope of retribution and justice against a system of international dominionist and interventionalist policy that has ultimately led them to perpetual misery. the solution is not to backdoor every crypto, but make structural and systemic changes in a concerted multinational fashion to help reduce and eliminate the instances of and impact from blind foreign intervention to advance imperialistic goals championed by 18th century conquistadors and feudal lords.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Slashdot is usually more skeptical than this, especially considering this was already very thoroughly debunked. Are the new editors trying to make a political statement? I don't like where this is going.
Repeating it again and again doesn't make it true.
Unfortunately, this is not accurate.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Paris Attacks Would Not Have Happened Without Crypto
That should really have been put in quotes to make it clear that this is what some guy is saying, and not anything remotely approaching a fact.
And even if technically true, the implications behind the making of the statement should probably be taken with a pinch of salt.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Crooks and terrorists won't care about a ban, and the "law abiding" people will be left entirely vulnerable to those crooks and criminals.
I doubt anyone can tell if any given post is using a strong or weakened cipher, at least not without some deep analysis of the data, effectively ruling out internet traffic, meaning their only "effective" ban would be to ban anything not sent in clear text.
I'm no psychic, but I can easily see how well that'll play out.
But, since when is it ever not a time of insecurity or crime? You are arguing that there never be privacy.
Don't step on the baby.
Wait, you mean those speeches at the debates were *encrypted*? Well, that makes sense now; what they were saying made no logical sense in English.
The one-time pad is 1000 times simpler than public-key encryption and trivial to put in an app.
Bruce Perens.
Unfortunately lots of folks get taken in when *an official* says something that implies risk and a simple answer.
Don't step on the baby.
We must take their word
It is a very well known fact that spies always tell the truth
Repeating it again and again doesn't make it true, it only makes it truthy. Which, alas, seems to be good enough for a lot of people.
The Paris attacks also wouldn't have happened with access to military grade firearms and explosives. Those are already quite restricted in most sane countries and it didn't seem to prevent anything.
So stop telling people you want to crack down on encryption to defeat the terrorists. We both know that's bullshit and wouldn't work even if you could manage it.
Log in or piss off.
They don't need to "hide" anything. You're failing to acknowledge the scale of the problem. You simply can't watch everyone. Trying to do so is a fool's errand.
Ultimately the only thing you will do is compromise everyone else's security.
The idea that they could have stopped it if only they could have spied on more people is a moronic, innumerate, fantasy.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
We need to be careful here:. The argument should be that it doesn't matter whether or not they used encryption. We should not destroy our ability to communicate privately since this is fundamental to a free society and worse, it would give the terrorists a government mandated backdoor they might get hold of. While it is tempting to just point out that this call is based on a lie (and if I were more cynical I might suspect that this is the reason for making such an obvious lie) one day it probably won't be so we need to make sure the real argument against mandated back doors is out there too.
Trump and Cruz have both said Apple should help the FBI.
I remember back in the mid 90s the Republicans were for smaller govt. Now they just want to double down on Authoritarianism/Statism. They want a huge govt, just don't want to pay the taxes it.
About the only Republicans that support encryption are the libertarian wing of the Republicans.
You simply can't watch everyone.
They don't care about effectively watching everyone. They want to have the option to dip in to any information about anyone they like, when they like. It's about power. People having secrets diminishes government power. They don't want people to have secrets that they don't at least have the option to learn about if the whim takes them.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
It will happen someday, though.
A terrorist will buy a set of Star Trek steak knives over eBay and they'll use HTTPS to transmit their eBay password. A future terrorist will lock the door of their house (why are these people even allowed to have locks, anyway?) and his wife will plaintext email him, "Did you lock the house? Remember, we're going to that party right after work tonight," and he'll say "quit telling all the snoops on the Internet which days our house has no one home," and they'll start encrypting their personal conversations. And that'll be that: they'll be encryption users too, just like the rest of us.
Some day, a terrorist is going to use a motor vehicle to travel from their home to the site of their terror.
Some day, a terrorist will use an alarm clock, instead of the sun, to get up at the correct time.
We need to face the facts: technology is bad. Anything that empowers humanity, can be used by humanity in the service of bad things. Power is bad. Capability is bad. Failing to starve when the gods wants you to starve is bad, and being immune to smallpox is bad and is why the gods have to invent new ones, like AIDS. It's time to end this nonsense of technology, and go back up into the trees. Because the apes in the trees never do anything bad to one another.
The reason I know that apes never try to harm one another, is because I carefully cultivate shocking ignorance about anthro-- er I mean -- zoology -- no, wait -- I mean biology since plants also do ev-- no wait: game theory. Well, I mean, statistics. I try to remain ignorance of mathematics and everything which stands upon or can be modelled by mathematics.
And you can too. Join me in giving a fuck about whether or not bad people use the same technology as good people.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It wouldn't have happened without Parisians, clearly we need to get rid of all the Parisians!
Dark skinned guy crossing borders and using encryption, what could be more suspicious?
What could be more suspicious ?
Adi Shamir trying to attend the Cryptology conference he did start him-self in the 80s ?
According to the US that's even worse.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Seriously, this is just getting stupid. What's next? "If only we had cameras and microphones in everyone's living rooms and bedrooms and did away with curtains and all privacy, we could stop all crime" First off, no, no you couldn't. You would however be engaging in a huge crime against humanity, which you are already engaged in by constant assaults on human rights...
Blame the Fox network. The pilot of the X-Files spin-off "The Lone Gunmen" gave OBL the plan to fly planes into the WTC....
100% agree, This statement appears to be based on the assumption that criminals are too stupid to implement their own one-time pad encryption system. 100% secure encryption has been possible for hundreds of years... criminals only use commercially available solutions because they are easily available, cheap, and easy. I also get a "methinks the maiden doth protest too much" feeling regarding all the whining about Apple not unlocking a phone for the FBI. If the NSA already had a way of unlocking iPhones, wouldn't they being doing everything in their power to convince criminals it was 100% secure? Lure them into a false sense of security then monitor all their data via a remote hack would be the fed's wet dream.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Apparently Sarah Palin has access to the most secure form of encryption known to mankind; I can't understand a thing she says!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.