Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
It is a belief system that needs to cease to exist.
How do you suggest we achieve that? Do you think we should just go ahead and kill 25% of the world's population? Would you suggest that the way to counter an ideology that believes in "convert or die" is to tell all of them that they need to either stop believing or die? What would that make us? Otherwise, what do you think is the best way to go about getting a couple billion people to abandon their beliefs that are over a millennium old, beliefs which form the foundation for the power structures in their countries, beliefs that people would rather fight and kill you over to preserve the power structure instead of abandon? And, for that matter, why stop at Islam? It seems like religion has been holding back real global progress, why not a push to take religion in general out of society?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black