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Paris Terrorists Used Burner Phones, Not Encryption, To Evade Detection (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes from an article on Ars Technica: New details of the Paris attacks carried out last November reveal that it was the consistent use of prepaid burner phones, not encryption, that helped keep the terrorists off the radar of the intelligence services. As an article in The New York Times reports: "the three teams in Paris were comparatively disciplined. They used only new phones that they would then discard, including several activated minutes before the attacks, or phones seized from their victims." The article goes on to give more details of how some phones were used only very briefly in the hours leading up to the attacks. "Everywhere they went, the attackers left behind their throwaway phones, including in Bobigny, at a villa rented in the name of Ibrahim Abdeslam. When the brigade charged with sweeping the location arrived, it found two unused cellphones still inside their boxes." At another location used by one of the terrorists, the police found dozens of unused burner phones "still in their wrappers." As The New York Times says, one of the most striking aspects of the phones is that not a single e-mail or online chat message from the attackers was found on them. But rather than trying to avoid discovery by using encryption -- which would in itself have drawn attention to their accounts -- they seem to have stopped using the internet as a communication channel altogether, and turned to standard cellular network calls on burner phones.
I'm shocked, shocked I say!
All cell phones must be purchased with gov't issued ID and registered to a SSN at time of purchase.
Sadly people in the US tend to picture the terrorists as being ignorant savages and maybe some of them are but they also have some very intelligent and resourceful people who develop methods of attack and avoidance of detection. I would hate to know how many dollars it takes to bag and tag just one terrorist, other than the ones at the lowest levels of their organizations. I suspect it would be millions of dollars for every real terrorist we stop.
Terrorism is just a scapegoat used to target encryption. The siege will continue unabated.
...or a phone whose battery gets so hot it starts a fire?
Just in case you're not being facetious, a "burner phone" is a phone that you might only use once or a few times before switching to another one. The idea is that by the time the good guys figure out the number you're using and get a warrant to listen to those calls, you've already switched to a different phone and they have to start the whole process all over again.
It is hard for the government, who everyone likes to turn to for solutions, to admit that the best solution is to mostly do nothing at all, aside from some common sense actions. It doesn't get people elected. It doesn't get big budget approved.
Ultimately, terrorists are hard to nab, especially radicalized first timers. To actually have a decent success rate requires expenditure or mobilization that costs a significant amount of money.
The government is best when it can dissuade attacks by threatening force or other sanctions. Unfortunately, these people don't care if they die, so it is hard to see what sort of sanction you could come up with, short of executing their families or something else they care about. Even then, these people are so messed up that they would think they are earning martyrdom for their families by getting them killed in such a way.
Of course, that said, the nice thing is that there aren't really that many suicidal bombers out there. They are a force to be reckoned with, but most humans, even radicals, are not *that* radical.
You know how to stop terrorism? Stop talking about it. Terrorist acts won't be stopped, but they will be rendered considerably less effective. Terrorism is useful because it causes fear and overreaction. That overreaction can radicalize people and wear down resistance to their aims. By themselves, the terrorists have killed a few thousand people and blown up a few buildings. That's peanuts in a country of 300 million people, so the only way they become powerful is when the media becomes their force multiplier.
There are thousands of people who die every day in the United States to gun violence due to gang killing, some of that is collateral damage where innocents get killed, so it isn't just "thugs".
We don't walk around really thinking about that too much, and consequently most of us don't live in fear of it unless we live up close to it. And why is that? Because it gets ignored in the media. We fear a once in every so-often elementary school shooting more than we fear something that happens multiple times every day, by organized criminal figures with teams of professional or semi-professional killers on their staff.
The catch is this... terrorists will kill people, but if you keep your measured responses targeted at the most effective programs that are aiming at things like education, outreach, and probably a few targeted teams of intelligence types, you decrease the odds of a terrorism death considerably, and without the rights violations. But it does require us to admit that *we cannot stop terrorists from killing some of us*, but also to understand that your risk of death is higher from just getting in a car to drive to work. You're just as likely to be accidentally killed by an gang war as collateral damage.
They've never been interested in the what's on the phone because they know nothing is there. Many of the people involved in the investigation have admitted as such. This case was entirely about precedent and remains so. If the FBI can cement a court victory in this case requiring a private company to build something for the FBI then the FBI can request that of any company or person under threat of imprisonment for contempt of court (you can't appeal contempt of court). A win would grant them basically a gold plated weapon to request anything they want in a criminal case. They could compel any company to develop devices or software to let them do things they couldn't normally do.
And this is a perfect test case for the FBI, they've got a known terrorist here, a phone he didn't own and a bunch of dead civilians. They likely couldn't find a more sympathetic case and they know it, that's why they are using it to try to get the golden bullet. The FBI win's and anyone could be pressed into service of the FBI developing things for their use in investigations of any kind.
The 24/7 spying is not about terrorists, it is all about tracking peaceful political activists, those people who do actively effect political change. Also all potential politicians, union leaders, government officials, anyone who could be potentially extorted at a latter date to empower the espionage/military industrial complex. As for the terrorist seeming to be so smart and effectively neutralising the investigative techniques that are being kept secret from the majority, ever consider that they were being too smart, smarter than in fact they should, smarter than they would be without professional assistance and this professional assistance working with the full knowledge of the investigative techniques being applied. The global espionage/military industrial complex worth trillions desperately needs enemies to fight and we know full well they have been purposefully creating them for decades and this corrupt activity is escalating.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen