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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.
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/
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.
The Paris attacks wouldn't have happened wihtout fanatism, extremist religions, guns, cars, street, stupidity, breathing, reproduction, the big bang and maybe good wine.
pretty sure it was islam in this case.... lets stop pretending that christians, buddists and hindus are out there blowing up buildings and mass shooting people (in the name of their religion) on a literal daily basis
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Your goggles are on too tight... you don't have to look very far back in time to find the IRA and other Christian groups doing their thing. Remember also the Tokyo ricin attacks? That was some local cult. How about David Koresh and Jim Jones?
Less is more.
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.