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.

Comments

shocker!

[ideadman]

I'm shocked, shocked I say!

But if we don't spy on everyone 24/7/365

[WillAffleckUW]

But if we don't accept airport scanning which doesn't detect 98 percent of usable devices, and 24/7 information on every citizen which provides zero usable intel on anyone with a World War I level of training in spycraft, how can we all Live In Fear?

Do you want to let the terrorists win?

The terrorists want us to Live In Fear!

So we must all Live In Fear to protect ourselves with useless actions that are not helpful in any way!

Re:But if we don't spy on everyone 24/7/365

[tnk1]

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.

 

Doesn't matter

[AlphaBro]

Terrorism is just a scapegoat used to target encryption. The siege will continue unabated.

Re:New rule

[igny]

You now also need to show a government issued id when you steal a phone or apply for a fake id.

Re:New rule

[sociocapitalist]

Too easy to work around. What we need is properly staffed security services. Enough workforce that the investigations can be efficient without throwing due process down the drain. You can't do that with mass surveillance. Almost all attackers in France had been on the radar of French services at some point. They went off the radar because they were considered less threatening, and France didn't have enough people to keep an eye on them while other individuals seemed more dangerous at the time.

What we 'need' to do is to wrap up the war in the middle east and build an infrastructure that gives the kids growing up there some hope for a future that compares favorably to blowing one's self up.

And as far as more security...there's plenty of security already in the airports in Europe - including Brussels - and it didn't do jack to stop the attack today.

We need a long term plan not just "more security forces" that aren't effective against people willing to blow themselves up to make a point.