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France Says Fight Against Messaging Encryption Needs Worldwide Initiative (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader shares a Reuters report: Messaging encryption, widely used by Islamist extremists to plan attacks, needs to be fought at international level, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Thursday, and he wants Germany to help him promote a global initiative. He meets his German counterpart, Thomas de Maiziere, on Aug. 23 in Paris and they will discuss a European initiative with a view to launching an international action plan, Cazeneuve said. French intelligence services are struggling to intercept messages from Islamist extremists who increasingly switch from mainstream social media to encrypted messaging services, with Islamic State being a big user of such apps, including Telegram. "Many messages relating to the execution of terror attacks are sent using encryption; it is a central issue in the fight against terrorism," Cazeneuve told reporters after a government meeting on security. "France will make proposals. I have sent a number of them to my Germany colleague," he said.

8 of 446 comments (clear)

  1. Straw Man. False Dichotomy. by zenlessyank · · Score: 4, Informative

    Insert bullshit excuse here. This is a call to increase encryption 10x fold. It is none of your business what I say to my wife while I am chatting. I repeat. It is NONE OF YOUR FUCKING business. I won't stop using encryption. I will kick a terrorist in the nuts. You chicken shit fuckers wanna hide in a building and do all your spying from a chair. I have an old pair of wart encrusted balls you can sniff. Germany and France should not be allowed to do anything together.

  2. Re:Widely Used!!!! by NatasRevol · · Score: 2, Informative

    Because of the right to privacy?

    ie fuck off

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    There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
  3. Paris terrorists used burner phones by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Paris terrorists used burner phones, not encryption, to evade detection

    "Everywhere they went, the attackers left behind their throwaway phones."

    Glyn Moody (UK) - 3/21/2016, 6:39 AM

    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. For example: "Security camera footage showed Bilal Hadfi, the youngest of the assailants, as he paced outside the stadium, talking on a cellphone. The phone was activated less than an hour before he detonated his vest." The information come from a 55-page report compiled by the French antiterrorism police for France’s Interior Ministry.

    Outside the Bataclan theatre venue, the investigators found a Samsung phone in a dustbin: "It had a Belgian SIM card that had been in use only since the day before the attack. The phone had called just one other number—belonging to an unidentified user in Belgium."

    As police pieced together the movements of the attackers, they found yet more burner phones: "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. That seems to be further evidence that they knew such communications were routinely monitored by intelligence agencies. 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.

    That authorities are only now discovering this fact shows how well the strategy worked.

    As Ars has reported, along with other countries the UK government is pushing for ways to circumvent or weaken encryption because it claims strong crypto creates a "safe space" for terrorists. This new information that the Paris attackers did not routinely use encryption, if at all, but turned instead to the tried-and-tested technique of burner phones, undermines the argument that everyone's communications must be weakened in order to tackle terrorism.

    The New York Times article suggests that there was some evidence of encryption software being used elsewhere. A witness reported seeing a terrorist with a laptop, and told the investigators that as the computer powered up, "she saw a line of gibberish across the screen: "It was bizarre—he was looking at a bunch of lines, like lines of code. There was no image, no Internet," she said." The New York Times writes: "Her description matches the look of certain encryption software, which ISIS claims to have used during the Paris attacks."

    But as many were quick to point out online, the witness probably wasn't looking at some encryption software in action, because such systems show the decrypted message, not the encrypted form. The former Ars Technica editor Julian Sanchez wrote on Twitter: "It's suggestive of a verbose boot. Using encryption looks like 'reading a message' because you decrypt it first."

    Until we have stronger evidence to the contrary, it seems likely that encryption played little or no part in the Paris terrorist attacks.

    This post originated on Ars Technica UK

    1. Re:Paris terrorists used burner phones by johanw · · Score: 3, Informative

      Belgium and Germany are now outlawing non-registered prepaid cards in response to that. They can for the time being buy Dutch prepaids but law enforcement lobbies will try to ban it there too.

  4. Re:Just like trying to ban guns by Salgak1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Home-made guns almost never happen? Like the 10% of captured guns in Australia ??

    And if you're talking improvised firearms, it's even easier. Hell, there are videos on YouTube showing you how. . .

  5. Re: Just like trying to ban guns by John+Allsup · · Score: 3, Informative

    You cannot make a gun with only 300 lines combined of JavaScript, HTML and php (given cryptojs). You can make a barebones secure messaging system requiring only a standard Lamp stack that easily. I did one out of boredom in about two hours, most of that looking up APIs, the result of which I dumped at http://pgen.chalisque.org/ssms... - too easy.

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    John_Chalisque
  6. Re: Just like trying to ban guns by Mister+Transistor · · Score: 3, Informative

    The use of phrases is called a code. That is a very simple verbal form of a cipher. Read up on the basics of codes and ciphers and you have a lot of the basic information you need on encryption.

    The other process you are describing is also well known, it's called "steganography". There are already algorithms written to not only encode data that way, but also to detect patterns of encoded data in an image. Read up on "stegbreak".

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    -- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
  7. Re:Just like trying to ban guns by cayenne8 · · Score: 3, Informative
    Well, it is pretty easy to BUY 80% Lowers for different firearms, they usually come with a jig to slap on it, drill out the last little bits, and Voila, you now have a fire arm with NO REGISTRATION or serial number required and you can build the rest from readily available parts....

    Perfectly legal...Example Here...

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    Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........