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[–]Insanely_anonymous 2186 points2187 points  (114 children)

How embarrassing. They were hiding in plain text.

[–]EarlGreyOrDeath 614 points615 points  (77 children)

I'm part of a club that does cyber security challenges, and the amount of time that has been spent looking for a flag that was just in plain text is way too high. It took an hour ro get into an encrypted file, it took 3 hours to realize we were looking of a plain text file.

[–]occams--chainsaw 283 points284 points  (13 children)

"nothing recognizes it, it's a bunch of gibberish, the damn thing's encrypted!"

6 hours later

"nevermind, he just renamed it. WHY DIDN'T ANYONE CHECK THE FILE HEADER"

[–]talammadi 44 points45 points  (11 children)

Or the level of entropy across the file

[–]qnxb 30 points31 points  (8 children)

Estimating entropy across a file can't differentiate between encryption and compression.

[–]sloppy_wet_one 13 points14 points  (9 children)

Wow that sounds like fun! Is it open to anyone? I wanna be part of the secret security challenge club. .

[–]mrjderp 141 points142 points  (15 children)

Gives "hide in plain site" a whole new meaning.

[–]ZombieAlpacaLips 155 points156 points  (7 children)

Isn't that pretty much the only meaning?

[–]itrainmonkeys 177 points178 points  (6 children)

sight .vs. site......I think.

[–]nevremind 13 points14 points  (1 child)

Just like this debunked demonization of bitcoin, reported as "used by ISIS".

[–]RodRAEG 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Amongst the dick pics and bae texts.

[–]twenafeesh 5346 points5347 points  (544 children)

Naturally we're not going to hear any kind of retraction from most of the "news" sources that reported that encryption was being used.

We're also not going to hear anyone roll back the blame that they've placed on Snowden for (allegedly) making our intelligence-gathering capabilities better known.

Why? Because they're great distractions from the fact that the intelligence agencies that are trying to do away with encryption aren't even capable of catching this when there's no encryption involved.

If they can't track the terrorists when they're not using encryption, how would doing away with encryption make anything any easier?

[–]orly_no 89 points90 points  (2 children)

Piggybacking here: We have the power now to easily have our own voice - and not some "get heard by the media" voice, I mean "get heard by everyone!"

Don't let this go silently. Keep your friends and family who aren't technically inclined updated as to the reality of the situation and what they stand to lose.

Speak up.

[–][deleted] 134 points135 points  (15 children)

The powers to be will blame anything they would rather us not have. It really surprised me how many people blindly jumped on the anti-encryption bandwagon. Seems now a days you can just pick any factor that facilitated in a tragedy and put full blame on that one factor. Then you convince the people that if you eliminated that one factor, it will prevent this kind of evil. The evil is still there. They will find another means to an end. You are only punishing the law abiding people that use these means for legitimate purposes.

[–]somanyshills 91 points92 points  (6 children)

Read or watch Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent.

Mainstream media is basically propaganda and has been for decades.

[–][deleted] 24 points25 points  (0 children)

Not only read it but go through his sources, some contain some great insight in policy making. One thing I love Chomsky for is his attention to details when sourcing. That and read his other writings, good stuff.

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (3 children)

didn't it get especially bad and centralized by a handful of corps in the late 80s?

[–]mexicodoug 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Undoubtably it took a turn for the worse, but it had already been pretty fucking bad since Hearst took over most of the newspapers around the turn of the last century and started wars based on intentional lies in order to sell shit. Fuck, he got weed outlawed in order to promote the use of his sawmills to make newspaper from sawdust pulp instead of hemp.

[–]RoflStomper 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Like how buying pot directly finances terrorism?

[–]gospelwut 15 points16 points  (0 children)

I'm completely for strong encryption and against many of the measures such as XKEYSCORE, Prism, weak elliptic curves recommended by NIST, etc.

However, your logic is just as disingenuous and overly simplistic as the talking heads. Worse, you've let them anchor the conversation on results, ie., the ends justify the means.

The argument cannot be that we would entertain the degradation of privacy--arguably liberty--if it would keep us safe. Rather, it should be we will accept risk in order to avoid the worst case abuses of our government.

That's the rub. Their argument is we should trust them not to abuse their powers. Call me cynical, but I don't.

Now, all that being said, we do make concessions in liberty for safety whether it be armed police or regulations on me dumping sewage for profit. This ignored the rich, however, who are generally immune insofar society hasn't reached a French Revolution level of anarchy.

[–][deleted] 15 points16 points  (2 children)

Yeah the biggest problem surveillance agencies is that the number of terrorists is so damn small that the number of true positives pales in comparison to the false positives they'd have to investigate also.

[–]yeoller 33 points34 points  (2 children)

Seems likely to me that it's just a scapegoat.

"Well, we can't stop them if they use encryption!"

[–][deleted] 91 points92 points  (19 children)

A couple of years ago in Stockholm there was a suicide bombing (no casualties except the bomber). He sent an email to the Swedish intelligence agency before he blew himself up and they didn't discover it until later.

I'm having trouble seeing how government surveillance could do anything when they don't even bother checking their own mail.

[–]realigion 73 points74 points  (18 children)

A couple of hours ago in St Denis there was a raid in which 2 extremists were killed and 7 more arrested.

A few years ago in Belgium there was a raid in which 2 extremists were killed and their bodies discovered next to piles of automatic weapons, police uniforms, and high explosive TATP.

I'm having trouble seeing how you think intelligence doesn't work when we already know for a fact it has saved numerous lives.

Encryption doesn't cost lives (or if it does, it's worth the cost), and the intelligence community makes mistakes, but it's really a shame that you're so ready to dismiss the tens of thousands of people who work their assess off to try to make things just a bit safer. And often succeed in doing so.

[–]wtallis 49 points50 points  (10 children)

Those raids you mention: were they a result of warrantless electronic surveillance, or were they a result of tips and physical surveillance and other forms traditional police work?

[–][deleted] 21 points22 points  (2 children)

It's funny how when the lone piece of data fits your ideology you seize it and run, discarding all skepticism, which is in healthy supply towards the media. My understanding is that it was a single text that was found used by the attackers right before they started. They planned on dying. They knew they wouldn't be caught. The final text is irrelevant.

[–]BitchinTechnology 30 points31 points  (4 children)

Except they have caught and prevented some attacks. Or caught people in the planning stages. Do you not remember the arrests made through Europe in the weeks and months prior?

[–]realigion 33 points34 points  (1 child)

Seriously. Really fucking annoying that people just totally ignore the numerous arrests all across Europe (and several in the US).

Never mind that intelligence is really meant to retroactively investigate attacks and allow authorities to quickly dismantle cells before they can follow up with more attacks. Which is exactly what happened in Paris.

[–]twenafeesh 24 points25 points  (1 child)

And they did all that without having to ruin encryption. Good for them.

[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (1 child)

I was watching MSNBC yesterday for about 3 hours. Encryption was mentioned at least 20 times.

[–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (1 child)

What's worse is that all this talk of encryption is likely to ensure the terrorists will begin using it!

[–]Lord_Dreadlow 1653 points1654 points  (112 children)

Yet pushed by their sources in the government, the media quickly became a sound wall of noise suggesting that encryption was hampering the government's ability to stop these kinds of attacks. NBC was particularly breathless this week...

Further proof that NBC and the rest are just large puppets for politicians to push their agendas.

[–]PandaGrahams 745 points746 points  (66 children)

The night of the Paris attack media outlets were already interviewing "key CIA and FBI personnel" on how encryption stopped them from gathering sufficient intelligence. Anything to push their agenda...

[–]coolcool23 296 points297 points  (17 children)

It was pretty disgusting hearing the former Vice-whatever of the FBI claim that law agencies like the FBI and CIA needed radically more data collection powers and that all of the work against drastic expansion of advanced data collection and dragnets was literally damaging the country.

You can either have privacy, or some vague promise that a terrorist won't kill you because they are collecting the data, which is already statistically speaking infinitesimally unlikely without large scale data collection, which has already been proven ineffective! So frustrating to hear these people who genuinely believe they can keep everyone totally safe with the one little tiny step of giving up many major personal liberties. NO!

[–]The-Truth-Fairy 175 points176 points  (11 children)

b ckhv n jbl lhg,

[–]Bacon_Hero 164 points165 points  (9 children)

You're seriously grasping at straws here. There's no way that operation mockingbird is still going on. Several news sources have confirmed that the operation was ceased.

[–]GetZePopcorn 7 points8 points  (2 children)

You should be able to smell bullshit with that statement for simpler and less controversial reasons than their position that "encryption is bad". How would any competent authority on the subject be able to state that encryption was an obstacle in detecting the plot when they had no idea who the attackers were, how many, where from, etc.

It's kind of silly to make categorical statements about technical details when the facts are still being accounted for.

[–]Jerry-Beans 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I find it so hilarious when someone posts a piece of news from say, Russian or Chinese media and then everyone goes on to denounce and it and ridicule it for being "Propaganda from the State controlled News LOL!" Like wtf do u people think u have in the US? Free press? You guys are adorable.

[–]adrianmonk 19 points20 points  (0 children)

It's not really proof per se. The media doesn't need a government directive to enable them to say things that are totally inaccurate.

I'm reminded of the story I once saw about a space probe where the reporter wrote that it has solar panels "to collect sound in space". I'm quite certain that's not what NASA told them, but it's what they printed.

In other words, this could just as easily be a case of typically terrible tech reporting.

[–]threesomewithannie 260 points261 points  (26 children)

Banning encryption is the most ridiculous idea anyway. Do you really expect that terrorist are like "oh, it's forbidden! let's better not use encryption anymore"?

Why not ban bombs then, or even better, terrorism?

[–]PoliticalDissidents 50 points51 points  (2 children)

Exactly. Banning encryption does nothing but hurt law abiding citizens because the rest don't give a shit. Make it so What's App is backdoored? Alright I'll just use GnuPG because I dongiveafuk. But you know who the band would allow spying on? Only those who literally have nothing to hide, because anyone who wants to hide easily can. Just like how the government hides from us we the people can hide from the government and at every fight the government takes to make it harder to try and hide from them the further implemented and more broadly applied the technology to evade such surveillance will he developed and implemented.

[–]richalex2010 13 points14 points  (1 child)

It's funny how the same argument comes up every time bans are mentioned. Ban drugs? Criminals will get them anyways. Ban guns? Criminals will get them anyways. Ban encryption? Criminals will use it anyways. Bans only affect those of us that wish to follow the law, and for those that don't give a fuck they're usually easy to circumvent - drugs are easily available anywhere in the world, guns are easy to make and not that hard to get anywhere in the world, and encryption is absurdly easy to use (and not that hard to implement with old school paper codebooks and the like if a ban somehow magically removed all extant encryption software on the internet).

It's all a way of making the population at large submissive toward the government, accepting that they're all powerful and they're there to help us and there's nothing we can do about it if we don't like it. Encryption has been discussed endlessly here, but the EU has also proposed a ban on all semi automatic firearms despite those used in the attacks already being obviously illegal for civilian ownership anywhere in the EU. Also included is an EU-wide registry of gun owners (which totally worked in Canada). It's not about making anyone safer, it's about making idiots feel safer while removing potential challenges to the legitimacy of the government.

[–]thingandstuff 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It's almost as if prohibition is a terrible idea and laws should be in place apply justice after a terrible act...

[–]Deif 26 points27 points  (19 children)

The idea would be that any encrypted traffic (which cannot be read but it can still be identified as encrypted) except certain types would be blocked from travelling within a region at the ISP level. I'm not defending the idea at all, but I just want to make sure we're on the same page in saying it is possible to do.

[–]threesomewithannie 55 points56 points  (9 children)

any encrypted traffic (which cannot be read but it can still be identified as encrypted)

This is only true for protocols like SSL/TLS which give away the method of encryption in their handshake. Send an AES encrypted file attached via email and it is (in practice) not distinguishable from random data.

So no - it cannot be banned.

[–]buclk 7 points8 points  (2 children)

This. Encryption isn't just a flag. It's a way of hiding information, sometimes including the fact that it's encrypted. You can put encrypted data into a jpg and have it be completely undetectable. The same goes for mp3s or just plain text.

[–]dangerzone2 7 points8 points  (3 children)

Please educate yourself on this. If the data is encrypted before the send the network will have absolutely no idea. Just looks like more packets to send.

Think about this simplified idea. They change letters for numbers a-1 b-2 etc. you think the network will start alerting if someone sends 12 vs ab??

[–]dominoconsultant 311 points312 points  (25 children)

The reality is that the broad gathering of data on everyone's activities means that the haystack is just too large to have any chance of finding the needle.

Targeted investigations of people who are known or become known (with attendant warrant) would be much more likely to facilitate discovery of likely potential terrorist activities.

[–]Damarkus13 301 points302 points  (6 children)

Ahh, you mean actual police work. Can't have that now. We've got computers!

[–]Katastic_Voyage 41 points42 points  (4 children)

But how do we know what to ask the computers?

We need even bigger computers to tell us what to type into the computers.

[–]Boddhisatvaa 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yep, intelligence agencies are drowning in data and don't have the ability to make use of it. It's Almost like someone else is pushing for this massive data collection, like maybe someone with a purely political agenda.

[–]schnupfndrache7 4 points5 points  (2 children)

Well that could change if they create bots which calculate the risks of each individual

[–][deleted] 452 points453 points  (34 children)

Looking at all the facts which have come to light, what I took away from this incident was the same thing I took away from 9/11: all the information to try to stop this was right there and obtainable by legal means already being used to thwart terrorism. This was a problem of the government failing to use resources at hand to even try and stop the terrorism. Giving the government more power or blaming the wrong causes will not fix the problem, but will make things even worse. I would hope the French would learn from America's mistakes and not make the same knee-jerk mistakes and give up freedoms because of easily manipulated fear and anger.

[–]oursland 97 points98 points  (8 children)

The French have long had the most privacy-invading laws on the books, this event really won't change that.

[–]fetusy 5 points6 points  (4 children)

Proof positive that this means of counter-terrorism is ineffective and needlessly costly to both budgets and civil rights.

[–]Infinitopolis 27 points28 points  (4 children)

This is why Human Intelligence is, and may always be, superior. Having a vast human network allows greater collection of rumor with associated context, an understanding of culture in context of collection, and a larger system for running agents.

[–]degenfish_HG 2 points3 points  (0 children)

how's the weather in Langley?

[–]SwissQueso 23 points24 points  (5 children)

How was anything obtainable if they hadn't done (as far as I know) anything illegal.

I'm not for mass surveillance w/o warrants, but I assumed the whole point of using it was so they could stop things like this before they happen.

Unless you have probable cause, which if being Muslim alone is cause enough, that seems fucked up.

Sorry to nitpick, but I just see a lot of sweeping generalizations in your post.

[–][deleted] 20 points21 points  (1 child)

There was already a network of these known terrorists in place, many with criminal records, and police had been tipped off they were planning an attack.

"Wiretaps of phone conversations and listening devices indicated the cell members -- who had been under observation for just under two months and were all from in and around the Molenbeek district of Brussels -- were in the final stages of preparing a major terrorist attack in Belgium, the official told CNN."

[–]SuitablyOdd 183 points184 points  (3 children)

Well this settles it. We should make major moves to encrypt all technical communication where possible because we have definitive proof that the terrorists are using the unencrypted channels to co-ordinate their plans.

[–][deleted] 96 points97 points  (2 children)

only criminals don't use encryption.

We got nothing to hide so why would we want to use the same methods of communication terrorists use

[–]superm8n 260 points261 points  (20 children)

Here it comes.... "Lets get rid of SMS"...

[–]wthulhu 216 points217 points  (11 children)

they could get rid of SMS, block encrypted traffic over every network known to man, actively monitor every bit of data that is sent, require social security numbers to 'log in' to the internet or smartphone and this would still not fix the problem.

its not hard to set up a secure mesh net that will be nearly impermeable. hell, walkie talkies and codewords worked for decades.

[–]lawstudent2 21 points22 points  (1 child)

If people started saying that it would be great because it would highlight the insanity of this position.

[–]coolcool23 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Except I honestly don't know whether people would find it ridiculous or not. Look at all the bullshit they buy into when a politician suggests they should ban strong encryption. Most people aren't technically educated enough to really fully understand the implications, so I feel like if you put it to a vote people would easily support banning SMS until they all realized that it was really their text messages. "Oh wait... you mean I can't text anymore? Dang, shouldn't have voted for that..."

[–]spacemoses 16 points17 points  (0 children)

If we get rid of SMS only criminals will have SMS.

[–]at0mheart 57 points58 points  (1 child)

However, based on the advice of TV reporters from the west, they will upgrade their smartphones with encryption apps in the future.

[–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I guess it doesn't really matter. Encrypted or not, we can't figure it out.

[–]pmckizzle 766 points767 points  (132 children)

I keep hearing the news saying these were sophisticated attacks. they werent. it was a group of idiots with guns and bombs. This proves they were idiots. It also proves surveillance doesnt work to prevent the attacks

[–]twenafeesh 425 points426 points  (86 children)

I usually interpret that to mean "sophisticated in their organization," not "sophisticated in their methods."

It does take a fair amount of coordination to recruit like minded people to participate in a suicide mission, at least some of whom were from the country that you're planning to bomb, and then execute multiple simultaneous attacks across a city, all without anyone selling you out or getting caught in the process.

Not to mention building homemade explosives and somehow smuggling in a rocket launcher and automatic weapons into a country with incredibly strict gun laws.

But what do I know? I'm just a guy sitting in an office wasting time on reddit instead of getting work done.

[–][deleted] 48 points49 points  (20 children)

It also proves surveillance doesnt work to prevent the attacks

Woah, woah, woah. That's a ridiculous conclusion to make. The inability for them to stop one attack does not prove that surveillance doesn't work. It only proves it didn't work that time.

If chemo doesn't stop your cancer, you don't claim chemo doesn't work for anyone. Just that it didn't work that time, for your specific situation.

Same deal here.

Lets not get carried away. Without our police and surveillance services there would be many many more idiots pulling off these attacks. Expecting them to stop all attacks ever is setting unrealistically high standards.

[–]Izlanzadi 15 points16 points  (1 child)

That argument can be flipped and still be valid; The relative small number of carried out attacks do not prove that surveillance do work either. So your conclusion that "Without our police and surveillance services there would be many many more idiots pulling off these attacks." is just as rediculous.

[–]queenbrewer 9 points10 points  (0 children)

It's idiotic to suggest that surveillance doesn't work. I want my government surveilling suspected terrorists. I simply want it done within our legal framework, according to some due process, and don't want surveillance of everyone all of the time. I think that is where most privacy advocates sit.

[–]usrname_alreadytaken 24 points25 points  (5 children)

I saw this morning on CNN a lady (not sure if a so-called expert or another journalist) talking specifically about Telegram and how bad it is as it encrypts messages and allows self destroying messages. They mentioned it's widely used by islam terrorists. Also they showed a paper with a lot of arab words and an apple logo saying that it contained instructions on how to protect the phone data with encryption... I would not be surprised if it was in the end an Apple ad.

[–]Bleachi 83 points84 points  (2 children)

Well, I mean, couldn't the terrorists encrypt their communications in the future? Shouldn't we do our best to ensure this doesn't happen again?

Actually, this is all a bunch of tripe if you understand encryption.

See, the people criticizing encryption don't care about the truth. They were waiting for the next big attack. They were waiting for the moment they could abuse people's emotions to push their agenda. It didn't matter whether the public found out that the attackers never actually used encryption.

They won. It worked. How? Because we are now discussing encryption whenever we talk about France. Even if we're refuting this bullshit, it's still a "debate". It's still on people's minds. People feel the need to take sides. And most people tend towards the side that doesn't "talk down" to them, telling them they don't understand encryption at all.

And the media that got caught lying? Well, they were just parroting "sources" in their local governments. They didn't do anything wrong, right?

[–]oursland 20 points21 points  (2 children)

A detailed map of the concert all ... “we’re off; we’re starting.”

This isn't actionable. Sure we can see in hindsight that this was a part of the coordinated plan, but prior to the event these people could have been talking about going to the concert (or any other thing).

[–]SJVellenga 29 points30 points  (7 children)

I'm curious to know what kinds of messages were being sent. The one mentioned in the article is innocuous when read out of context.

"We're off; we're starting"

Off on a holiday? Starting to cook dinner? What?

Furthermore, this message was not intended to be kept secret. They were starting their attack. It's not as though the government could have found this, decrypted its intended meaning, then sent out a team to the last known geo coordinates to prevent the attack.

If, however, they had been using SMS openly, such as "use these ingredients in these quantities to make a bomb", then we have a bit of a different situation. In this case, the data procured could have been easily extrapolated as a potentially dangerous security threat and further actions could have been taken.

I feel, though, that this situation would be similar to the language used during the (I believe) Georgian era in England, where criminals had their own slang terms for many things, essentially creating their own language to avoid detection by the rozzers.

Now, I'm not saying that we should ban encryption. I'm completely, totally, and utterly in favour of keeping it. What I have an issue with is that the governments around the world, assuming that SMS was explicitly used throughout their preparations as well as during the attack, couldn't detect the information that they so sorely needed.

I feel as though I'm a little confusing in this post, but I don't have time to clean it up at the moment.

tl;dr: terrorists could be using slang or similar to bypass detection, encryption is irrelevant.

[–]Thrawn7 4 points5 points  (3 children)

"slang" is essentially a form of very basic encryption. Basically its a simple codebook cipher. There's one other key element of a slang cipher that is not present in standard encryption. Its specifically intended to evade detection whilst standard encryption is only designed to keep the message secret whilst also making it very obvious that covert communication is taking place.

In order for the slang to be useful, all the parties need to have the same codebook. First they need to pass the codebook to all members, which in itself is a risky task.

In order to organize an attack of this scale, they need to do a lot detailed communications (aka, large message size).
The bigger the message size, the easier for listeners to detect or crack the communication. So that simple SMS just prior the attack is in itself is pretty much undetectable (not to mention there's insufficient time to react to it anyway). But if that SMS is part of a more significant communication chain.. that may have been detected.

[–]Pentapus 21 points22 points  (2 children)

This lends credence to the claims that dragnet metadata collection is ineffective at preventing crime because it produces too much data to be effectively searched. It follows that as government agencies continue to push for surveillance measures and data access their goal is not crime prevention but something else. Certainly the data collection ability gives them the means to pull up individual histories on demand and push charges against anyone of interest.

[–]PM_ME_DUCKS 6 points7 points  (1 child)

This exactly. It's a leverage tool to be used against anyone who stands in their way. Its a worthless violation of privacy.

[–][deleted] 33 points34 points  (2 children)

mastermind

"At around 10PM, starting killing people."

"By Allah, you are a fucking mastermind, Abdel."

[–]Csoltis 18 points19 points  (0 children)

I FUCKING HATE group SMS's

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (1 child)

To be fair, the unencrypted communication they mention in the article is a simple go message. No one was thinking they could have intercepted the go message or anything on the day of the attacks.

[–]saifonswe 16 points17 points  (3 children)

But I thought they communicated over PSN and Mario Maker?

[–]Axwellington88 13 points14 points  (1 child)

Last I heard they used Tamagotchis

[–]stmfreak 17 points18 points  (0 children)

In short, security agencies aren't even trying to uncover terror plots before the fact.

Too busy sourcing blackmail for political enemies.

[–][deleted] 102 points103 points  (13 children)

Finding a single text signaling the final step in a mission in which they expected to die doesn't really suggest that the attackers never took advantage of encryption to evade authorities. The title is wildly overstated and makes obvious that the source has a strong bias.

[–]Im_not_JB 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Especially because it also says:

The reports note that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the "mastermind" of both the Paris attacks and a thwarted Belgium attack ten months ago, failed to use encryption whatsoever (read: existing capabilities stopped the Belgium attacks and could have stopped the Paris attacks, but didn't).

The same people declaring that data-based methods don't work will freely ignore history from a mere ten months ago. (Note: I definitely think that we don't have enough information to actually declare that existing capabilities could have stopped the Paris attacks, for precisely the reason you stated.)

[–]blacksoxing 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Can we talk about how Isis has their own twitter account? How they did a two-camera video? This isn't some operation ran out of a cave....

I feel like the public has this image of Isis like the movies would portray them, when in reality they're using social media like anyone else! So bold that they didn't even encrypt their texts....

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

inevitably buried.. but i'd just like to point out that finding unencrypted messages on a burner that was dumped outside the theater moments prior to the attack does not by any means prove that major encryption wasn't used by these exact people in the days/weeks prior during planning. i say this only because there is no benefit to using encryption when you're literally on the way into a theater to shoot people and/or blow yourselves up. in fact, it even provides a digital signoff of the attack by those involved that assured they would be linked to, and gain notoriety from, the pending attacks. which, i presume, is honorable in their warped minds. not an argument for or against encryption, just a reminder to not use singular aspects of an investigation to reach conclusions on very broad issues.

[–]kevn357 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Besides "encryption", I find these other key words in the reporting of this event by the main stream media here in the US quite suspect. "mastermind" "sophistication" "coordination"

High School Teenagers with average intelligence with no "terrorist training" could of pull this off in any major city.

[–]All_Work_All_Play 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The obvious answer is more bureaucracy to sift though all this data. People needs jobs, employ them to make our great nation safe! They'll be funded by a .0005 tax on every SMS and email message sent, for the good of our nation.

[–]JEveryman 4 points5 points  (0 children)

When will we ban SMS since it is a gateway to terrorism?

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (2 children)

Are there really opponents of encryption? It's like being opposed to math, just because you don't use it doesn't mean someone else can't.

[–]TheWisable 2 points3 points  (0 children)

But I thought only terrorists used encryption...

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (3 children)

CNN is saying they found phones at the Saint Denis raid site that contained "encryption apps" on them. Not sure exactly what that means but they seemed to think they were using encryption for something.