[Cryptography] ISIS has ‘help desk’ to aid would-be terrorists with encryption

Phillip Hallam-Baker phill at hallambaker.com
Thu Nov 19 09:53:36 EST 2015


I am getting so fed up with unsourced nonsense stories.

The CIA is fully capable of making an official statement. The CIA
director and the DNI regularly give press interviews, public speeches
and testify in Congress. If either the NSA or the CIA believes these
things are happening and believes we should know that is the case,
they can do so by having a named spokesperson give an on the record
briefing.

So there are three possibilities when it comes to evaluating claims:

* The 'official sources' either are not sure about the information or
are simply lying

* The 'official sources' are leaking information that the agencies
would rather remain confidential for operational reasons.

* The claims don't actually come from an official source, they come
from someone who is pretending to know more than they do or have come
from an official source through a long line of intermediaries who have
completely misunderstood or misrepresented what was said.

It now turns out that there is absolutely no evidence of a Playstation
4 being involved in the attack. What happened was that this was put
out as a hypothetical to show how hard the problem of intelligence is
today and this hypothetical was assumed to be an example.

It now turns out that there is absolutely no evidence of the Paris
attackers having used encryption. The cell phone that was recovered
has only short SMS messages that would only convey information to
someone who already knew the plan. There is no need to encrypt a
message that says 'Go'.

The Paris attacks were conducted by a group of people who had military
weapons and had been trained to use them. There is no evidence of any
communication between DAESH HQ and the attackers of any sort. But even
if the attack was performed on orders from HQ, there is no reason to
believe that these amounted to anything more than 'kill as many
infidels as you can in a European capital of your choice as soon as
possible'. There is no reason to believe that DAESH HQ would have
anything to contribute to the planning of the attack.

So what we have here is a clash of cultures. The highly centralized,
rigid, US military is unable to function without constant
communication. At this point, the decision to launch missiles from a
drone is frequently taken at the level of Colonel or above. Being used
to this situation, the US military seems unable to comprehend that
another organization would not consider it necessary. Which is really
odd since only a few decades ago, US special ops would have conducted
operations under complete radio silence as a matter of course.


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