You Can’t Make This Stuff Up
After a Belgian official made the statement that the terrorists who attacked Paris were communicating with Sony Playstations, every media outlet reported it and Sony started issuing statements about its willingness to cooperate with officials in the investigations of PS4 users.
Cue Emily Litella. The official had apparently seen the evidence inventory of another raid, not any of the raids associated with the terrorist attack on Paris.
All of the claims about how ISIS communicates are flat out guesses, not based on actual intel. If they are using ‘Net communications, which isn’t certain, there are any number of free, open source applications that can be used, and that would be more difficult to intercept and decrypt than any of the popular programs. I’m not claiming that the less popular programs are better than the big name programs, only that fewer people are attempting to break them, so there are fewer tools available for the effort.
The intel/security people are using the Paris incident to lobby for larger budgets and more power.
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Of course the intel people are going to use the Paris incident to lobby for larger budgets and more power. And water is wet.
There was definitely some command and control here, but it’s not likely to have been anything as sophisticated as an encryption program. More like messengers with standard tradecraft (blind drops and such), and SMS and pre-arranged code phrases. The rapidity with which the terrorist cells were identified and missing people rounded up afterwards tends to indicate that, because all the French had to do was check cell phone records for the area and identify suspicious text messages and phone calls to connect the dots. The more sophisticated you get, the more you stand out beforehand because there just aren’t many of us using the more sophisticated communications technologies, and they weren’t concerned about what happened after they blew up / shot up their victims, just with escaping detection beforehand.
My initial reaction precisely. And I have no training at all in that sort of “tradecraft.” I’m not even one of those legendary “computer security experts” I keep hearing about on TV. For about a century at least, any supplier of military hardware (or more recently software) has a large lobbying contingent and enough human intel sources to feed it the necessary facts to assure its cash flow. Duh!
To the public at large, and even to some “experts,” anything that looks like it might contain, say, encryption capabilities is surely useful military hardware. I can’t help remembering the talking doll a decade or two ago which was forbidden within CIA (among other agencies) because it recorded and repeated some fragments of ambient conversation in generating its own replies. Which were utter nonsense, not coded verbal messages…
no, no, no, not true!
we have it straight from the horse’s, uh, mouth – they used playstations and Xboxes!
http://ricksblog.biz/lopez-cantera-on-isis-evil-in-ways-that-have-not-been-seen-before-podcast/
and evil in ways that have not been seen before? srsly? I doubt that.
This crap is the reason that people think the US intel community ‘missed’ the fall of the Soviet Union. The military industrial complex couldn’t squeeze cash out of the Congresscritters without a enemy, and the Vietnam War was over, so the MIC ignored the intel and claimed that the USSR was a formidable opponent as it was collapsing from a lack of maintenance.
This was a platoon level attack at best so you don’t need much ‘command & control’. Using encryption draws attention and the pros know it. Local dialects and jargon are effective at stalling realization of what you are talking about. It isn’t difficult to make things opaque to outsiders.
Steve, you are remembering the intel assault on the Furbys. NSA generated a memo banning them from all facilities, but then they held me for 2 hours while I was attempting to out-process at NSA HQ because there were dental x-rays in my medical records. They kept the x-rays, but I had to wait while they checked the films for microdots or other secret stuff.
Hipparchia, just because it hasn’t been made into a TV movie doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. These people need to do more reading.
Well, they definitely needed to coordinate arriving at three different places at roughly the same time, but from continued reading of what they’re finding out, it appears my guess was correct — they used regular old cell phones with code phrases and circumlocutions to do it, and the final code phrases weren’t even code phrases, they were totally in the clear as they chatted with each other to insure they were all in position and ready to go. Because by that time it didn’t matter.
When you consider just how much data is being sucked up by whatever the French equivalent of Prism is, there’s simply no way to process it all in anything approaching real time except as a retrospective thing. So they relied on simply not doing anything unusual enough to bring them to notice, and betting that their activities would not be picked up until after it was too late. They won(?) that bet.
Had they thought it through they would have figured out that attacking while people were queuing or leaving the stadium would have produced more casualties than attempting to enter the stadium with the level of security present. Only one bystander was killed by three suicide bombers around the stadium.
They were apparently quite chatty, because after the police recovered a cell phone at the seen, they started launching raids, including the one that resulted in the death of the leader.
I have been complaining about the data overload since Total Information Awareness was proposed by Poindexter. The US doesn’t have the analysts to deal with what was collected before 9/11. We had what we needed to to defend against 9/11, but no one looked at it until after the attack.
My suspicion is that the “police recovered a cell phone” thing is a cover story to disguise the fact that the French have an equivalent to Prism sucking up all cell phone communications in France. The French are not idiots. They aren’t going to give away their capabilities through stupidity the way American politicians and agencies manage to do, either through giving a sysop contractor too much access or by simply blurting out top secret info that divulges sources and/or methods. But of course with the cell phone story there is plausible deniability. Which is good enough for me, if I were in a position to do so I certainly wouldn’t be pressing them on this.
What is interesting is that not one actual Syrian seems to have been involved, fake Syrian passport notwithstanding. They were all European citizens. Funny how an attack by Europeans is now being used by rabble-rousers in the United States to try to block the resettlement of refugees who are, err, *not* Europeans….
-BT
Given the speed with which they were able to follow-up, it is very probable that they found one cell phone which would allow them to quickly search through the thousands of records they “don’t hoover up in Paris every hour because that would violate EU data laws”. 😉
They do have major video assets throughout Paris, but you need at least one of the burner phones involved to effectively search the data in a few hours. They would be able to ID the perps from the video, but tracking the cells requires more, and the phone calls would build the network for them.
There is some kind of disconnect with Republicans. The 9/11 attackers were almost all Saudis, and they attacked Iraq. The Paris attackers were French and Belgians, but they blame Syrians. Geographic dyslexia?
Bryan – Thanks for reminding me of the name of the thing, “Furby”! That was all I needed to be able to find the doggerel I wrote on 1/13/1999, which is no longer online on my site but I’ll post it here, straight from my personal archive:
Someone’s a Little Fuzzy,
but
Furby it From Me To Say Who
If you’re looking for the winner in the Paranoia Derby,
I suggest the spooks at NSA who classified the Furby.
I’ve inquired about the wherefores, but the bureaucrats are balking;
They refused requests for interviews… and Furby isn’t talking.
One assumes they fear the Furby, reckless creature prone to chatter,
Overhearing something classified, and passing on the matter.
Round the children of the household the suspicions doubtless hover:
For their Furby has been sighted in their bedroom… undercover.
When they overheard the Furby say “deployment of the troops,”
Furby’s echoing what Sis said, that the boy made all the poops.
And mysterious allusions made to “weapons to Saddam,”
Were the Furby’s hash of Bobby’s plaint: what happened to my Mom?
While the NSA thinks Furby’s gonna give away the store,
All the rest of us believe the little critter’s quite a bore.
Though the biggest risk is he’ll repeat what Daddy said to Mommy,
To the spies, he is an unredeemed cold warrior and a Commie!
I assert the little guy could be the savior of our nation:
For just thirty bucks, he’d be a source of pure disinformation.
We could place him in the NSA, then dump him in the streets…
How the hell could foreign agents understand what he repeats?
And just how could evil agents make him spill the stuff he knows?
Could they threaten shoving nails up Furby’s nonexistent toes?
Or remove his ears and beak, and dump his RAM if he is mute?
Never fear, no one could torture him: he’s just so blessed… CUTE!
– Steve Bates, 1/13/1999
Today we have Minions, who are every bit as intelligible as Furbys. The job of the security paranoids in government depended on their finding ‘threats to national security’ in everything, even cheap, distorted electronic ‘parrots’ in faux fur.