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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.
People will just make their own.
>Messaging encryption, widely used by Islamist extremists to plan attacks
And much more widely used by spouses to talk to their spouses to remind them to pick up milk from the supermarket because the bottle is almost empty.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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.
Let's re-word this a bit.
We know for a fact that most of the Terror attacks were planned "in the clear". Most are at a loss on how to use encryption or have the tools needed to make use of encryption.
Next, everyone using the internet for anything uses encryption, everyone. be it SSL, TLS, SSH, PGP, GPG, whatever.
What France is trying to say (and what the US and Britain as well intend) is to get people riled up over encryption so that they can make it illegal for EVERYONE to use if it doesn't have a "back-door" or "golden-key".
This would cause a complete failure for security / encryption and safety worldwide. Secure communications between traffic-control and air-towers would be subject to attack. Subway and Train communications that control track switching and timing would be vulnerable.
Identity theft would go through the roof, the stock market would crash, dogs and cats living together, mass-hysteria!!
But, then again, that is what the "Terrorists" want. And our governments are rolling over, exposing their soft, bloated underbellies to ISIS.
...that this is about terrorism. FFS we have the best military intelligence in the world, and we can't stop a rag-tag bunch of third-world "militants"? Bull. Shit.
Every time the elites want more control over the populace or want to ban something, they trot out their wholly-owned and operated subsidiary ISIL (or whatever they're called this week, Taliban, Al-Qaeda, etc.) to demonize the freedom du jure and everyone bends over. Banning encryption is not "central to defeating terrorism", banning encryption is "central to defeating personal liberty".
These Reuters/AP/wire reports always read properly when you replace terrorism with liberty or freedom anyway. Liberty must be stopped. Freedom is running rampant. Liberty is at odds with modern society. The actual terrorist acts could be stopped if governments wanted them to stop, but they don't want them to, they want to exacerbate them in the name of stopping freedom.
We must ban all people from meeting in groups without authorized monitoring... they could be plotting evil.
We must ban the use of paper, it leaves no lasting evidence after it's destroyed.
We must monitor everything and everyone, everywhere.
Big brother is the only way to stop terror. It is necessary, it is the only moral thing to do. We must make it a world law, all offenders will be punished.
With these wise and urgently needed social advances..finally the populace will be safe, and under control.
Although the worldwide initiative I have in mind involves a purging of clueless, imbecilic politicians...
#DeleteChrome
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
We blame terrorism on encryption because we don't want to admit the real problem. The same is often true for gun control, especially recently. Why do people get offended when I say that Islam is evil? Why is this considered bigotry?
Islam isn't a race or an ethnicity. It's a religious belief. Specifically, it's a belief that Allah is the only god, Mohammed is his prophet, and the Qur'an is the literal word of god. We wouldn't call Christianity a race, so why would we act like Islam is a race? A large number of Muslims are either Arabs or Persians, which are two different ethnicities.
Not all religions or beliefs are equal. Would the belief that the Earth is flat be equally as valid as believing that the Earth is round? Is a belief that the moon landings were faked as valid as believing that they really happened? Is it equally as valid to believe that humans aren't causing global warming as it is to believe that humans are causing a lot of the warming? In each case, one belief is obviously right and another is wrong. And then there are religions like Scientology, which is clearly a scheme to profit rather than a sincerely developed belief. Again, it is not to be taken seriously.
While religions are never supported by testing hypotheses, they can still be judged on how they teach believers to act. Islam clearly teaches that non-believers should be given the choice to either convert or die. This is stated in the Qur'an and echoed in present day Islamic teaching. It is also clearly wrong. A significant portion of Muslims genuinely believe they need to kill non-believers. This is not true of Christianity, which teaches to love your neighbor and love your enemy. Even the most perverted forms of Christianity such as the Westboro Baptist Church don't believe in killing people. They are perverted, no doubt, but they stick to offensive speech and claim that their god is punishing people for sins, usually homosexuality. They are perverted, but unlike Islam, they're not killing anyone.
Virtually all Christians are taught that if they committed acts of terror like what is frequently done by Muslims, they would get an instant one way ticket to hell. Islam could discourage terrorism by teaching the same thing, but instead they teach that it results in a trip to heaven where they get 72 virgins. Unlike Christianity, Islam clearly condones violence and terrorism.
Why, then, do we pretend that Christianity and Islam are equally valid and call anyone who objects a bigot? Islam is objectively worse than Christianity. It is a belief system that needs to cease to exist. Some beliefs are so harmful that they need to be eradicated. Islam is at the top of the list.
I imagine a call for banning clueless politicians who are always framing encryption under the terrorism threat agenda would be way more benefitial to the world.