Government is Lying – New Study Shows No Increase in Use of Encryption by Jihadists Since Snowden Revelations

Speaking less than three days after coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris killed 129 and injured hundreds more, Mr. Brennan complained about “a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists.”

What he calls “hand-wringing” was the sustained national outrage following the 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, that the agency was using provisions of the Patriot Act to secretly collect information on millions of Americans’ phone records.

It is hard to believe anything Mr. Brennan says. Last year, he bluntly denied that the C.I.A. had illegally hacked into the computers of Senate staff members conducting an investigation into the agency’s detention and torture programs when, in fact, it did. In 2011, when he was President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, he claimed that American drone strikes had not killed any civilians, despite clear evidence that they had. And his boss, James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has admitted lying to the Senate on the N.S.A.’s bulk collection of data. Even putting this lack of credibility aside, it’s not clear what extra powers Mr. Brennan is seeking.

– From the New York Times editorial board article: Mass Surveillance Isn’t the Answer to Fighting Terrorism

Let’s get a few things clear right off the bat.

U.S. intelligence agencies have been waiting for a terror attack to do two things. 1) Blame Edward Snowden. 2) Target Encryption.

This is why in the immediate aftermath of the Paris tragedy, we saw the following…

From the post, Meet the Institution Most Intent on Destroying American Freedom – (*Hint: It’s Not ISIS):

CIA Director John Brennan said Monday he suspects the Islamic State is currently working on more terrorist plots against the West following Friday’s attack in Paris that killed at least 129 people and injured hundreds more. He also criticized new privacy protections enacted after Edward Snowden’s disclosures about U.S. government surveillance practices.

In his remarks, Brennan said the attacks should serve as a “wake-up call” for those misrepresenting what intelligence services do to protect innocent civilians. He cited “a number of unauthorized disclosures, and a lot of handwringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists.”

Of course, it wasn’t just Brennan. As noted in yesterday’s post, U.S. Government Moves to Exploit Paris Terror Attacks to Ban Privacy:

The bloodshed in Paris led U.S. officials Monday to renew calls for limits on technology that prevents governments from spying on phone conversations, text messages and e-mails.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, said she asked Silicon Valley companies to help law enforcement and intelligence agencies access communications that have been encrypted — or scrambled to evade surveillance — if terrorists are using the tools to plan attacks.

“I have asked for help. And I haven’t gotten any help,” Feinstein said Monday in an interview with MSNBC. “If you create a product that allows evil monsters to communicate in this way, to behead children, to strike innocents, whether it’s at a game in a stadium, in a small restaurant in Paris, take down an airliner, that’s a big problem.”

Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on MSNBC Monday that “it’s time we had another key that would be kept safe and only revealed by means of a court order.”

In a breath of fresh air, the New York Times editorial board actually did its job of talking truth to power in a blistering piece published earlier this week titled, Mass Surveillance Isn’t the Answer to Fighting Terrorism. Here are some excerpts:

It’s a wretched yet predictable ritual after each new terrorist attack: Certain politicians and government officials waste no time exploiting the tragedy for their own ends. The remarks on Monday by John Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, took that to a new and disgraceful low.

Speaking less than three days after coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris killed 129 and injured hundreds more, Mr. Brennan complained about “a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists.”

What he calls “hand-wringing” was the sustained national outrage following the 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, that the agency was using provisions of the Patriot Act to secretly collect information on millions of Americans’ phone records.

It is hard to believe anything Mr. Brennan says. Last year, he bluntly denied that the C.I.A. had illegally hacked into the computers of Senate staff members conducting an investigation into the agency’s detention and torture programs when, in fact, it did. In 2011, when he was President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, he claimed that American drone strikes had not killed any civilians, despite clear evidence that they had. And his boss, James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has admitted lying to the Senate on the N.S.A.’s bulk collection of data. Even putting this lack of credibility aside, it’s not clear what extra powers Mr. Brennan is seeking.

Most of the men who carried out the Paris attacks were already on the radar of intelligence officials in France and Belgium, where several of the attackers lived only hundreds of yards from the main police station, in a neighborhood known as a haven for extremists. As one French counterterrorism expert and former defense official said, this shows that “our intelligence is actually pretty good, but our ability to act on it is limited by the sheer numbers.” In other words, the problem in this case was not a lack of data, but a failure to act on information authorities already had.

As we all know, the government never lets truth get in the way of good propaganda.

In fact, indiscriminate bulk data sweeps have not been useful. In the more than two years since the N.S.A.’s data collection programs became known to the public, the intelligence community has failed to show that the phone program has thwarted a terrorist attack. Yet for years intelligence officials and members of Congress repeatedly misled the public by claiming that it was effective.

The New York Times simply nails it here. The American intelligence agencies merely make shit up in order to keep their little surveillance state going. Such as saying Edward Snowden’s revelations were what taught terrorists to use encryption. In fact, a recent study showed absolutely no uptick in jihadists’ use of encryption since the Snowden information was revealed.

From the Daily Dot:

Is Edward Snowden to blame, even indirectly, for the Paris attacks that left 129 dead and hundreds others injured?

Ask surveillance hawks, and you’ll likely get an emphatic “Yes!” The rising popularity of encrypted communications following Snowden’s 2013 leak of gigabytes of secret NSA documents has made terrorists far more difficult to identify, they say. Without Snowden, the attackers would still be out in the open.

Not so, according to a newly released study, which found no increase in encrypted communications among jihadist networks.

Flashpoint Global Partners, a firm that specializes in uncovering threats on the Dark Net and Deep Web and the creator of the study, found that“underlying public encryption methods employed by online jihadists do not appear to have significantly changed since the emergence of Edward Snowden.”

In an op-ed released Monday, however, London Mayor Boris Johnson explicitly named Snowden, saying he helped terrorists “avoid being caught.”

“To some people the whistleblower Edward Snowden is a hero; not to me,” Johnson wrote. “It is pretty clear that his bean-spilling has taught some of the nastiest people on the planet how to avoid being caught.”

Truthfully, if anyone in British society could be expected to run his mouth without having a clue as to what he was saying it would be Boris Johnson. Recall:

London’s Mayor Says We Should “Thank the Super Rich” – Calls Them “Tax Heroes” and Compares them to the “Homeless and Irish Travelers”

Indeed, terrorists were already using encryption well before Snowden, and continue to do so at similar rates…

Part of the reason Flashpoint found little uptick in the use of encrypted communications technologies since the Snowden leaks, the study says, is because jihadists were already using them.

“For many years, the jihadi community has been cognizant of the benefits of encrypted communications and, as such, has developed its own proprietary cryptologic software in order to meet this demand,” the report says. “In October 2010, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) dedicated an entire sub-section of its English-language Inspire Magazine to help teach would-be AQAP recruits about the need for digital encryption.”

Because “online jihadists were already aware that law enforcement and intelligence agencies were attempting to monitor them,” the study concludes, “the Snowden revelations likely merely confirmed the suspicions of many of these actors, the more advanced of which were already making use of—and developing—secure communications software.”

I know what you’re thinking. Since terrorists are already using encryption, we need to ban it!

Wrong. First of all, such a strategy would destroy the internet as we know it, as Bruce Schneier previously warned. Second, making corporations provide a backdoor would not only decrease security for everyone, but it wouldn’t prevent terrorists from using strong encryption anyway. As the Daily Dot article noted, the jihadists are using their own proprietary cryptologic software. In addition, forcing Apple to create a backdoor doesn’t stop anyone from using strong encryption effectively if they are careful and know what they are doing technically.

As Cory Doctorow notes at BoingBoing:

A new report from the Manhattan District Attorney calls for law requiring “any designer of an operating system for a smartphone or tablet manufactured, leased, or sold in the U.S. to ensure that data on its devices is accessible pursuant to a search warrant.”

Smartphones (a marketing category with no legal definition or firm boundaries) are general-purpose computers, capable of running any code that will compile, including the myriad of end-to-end cryptographic communications tools currently extant.

There’s no practical way for a smartphone vendor to give me a computer capable of running all the valid programs, but still grant law enforcement access to the data stored on it if I don’t cooperate.

There is, however, a very impractical way: the vendors could come up with a secret backdoor for my phone, perhaps a keylogger that stores all my keystrokes (including the passphrases for my secret files), and hope that I never discover and disable this.

The technical term for this security model is “wishful thinking.”

The alternative is to just have phones that, out of the box, don’t have working crypto. That would require criminals who want to have secrets from the police to download and install their own software. This is something that law enforcement agencies ensure us criminals are already doing.

Yes, and they were doing it before Snowden said anything. Can we please not destroy the internet for no reason.

In the event you remain unconvinced about the logistics and realities of “cracking down on encryption,” see the following from TechCrunch:

Bottom line: banning encryption or enforcing tech companies to backdoor communications services has zero chance of being effective at stopping terrorists finding ways to communicate securely. They can and will route around such attempts to infiltrate their comms, as others have detailed at length.

Here’s a recap: terrorists can use encryption tools that are freely distributed from countries where your anti-encryption laws have no jurisdiction. Terrorists can (and do) build their own securely encrypted communication tools. Terrorists can switch to newer (or older) technologies to circumvent enforcement laws or enforced perforations. They can use plain old obfuscation to code their communications within noisy digital platforms like the Playstation 4 network, folding their chatter into general background digital noise (of which there is no shortage). And terrorists can meet in person, using a network of trusted couriers to facilitate these meetings, as Al Qaeda — the terrorist group that perpetrated the highly sophisticated 9/11 attacks at a time when smartphones were far less common, nor was there a ready supply of easy-to-use end-to-end encrypted messaging apps — is known to have done.

Point is, technology is not a two-lane highway that can be regulated with a couple of neat roadblocks — whatever many politicians appear to think. All such roadblocks will do is catch the law-abiding citizens who rely on digital highways to conduct more and more aspects of their daily lives. And make those law-abiding citizens less safe in multiple ways.

There’s little doubt that the lack of technological expertise in the upper echelons of governments is snowballing into a very ugly problem indeed as technology becomes increasingly sophisticated yet political rhetoric remains grounded in age-old kneejerkery. Of course we can all agree it would be beneficial if we were able to stop terrorists from communicating. But the hard political truth of the digital era is that’s never going to be possible. It really is putting the proverbial finger in the dam. (There are even startups working on encryption that’s futureproofed against quantum computers — and we don’t even have quantum computers yet.)

Meanwhile, the pathetic desperation within the intelligence community to demonize heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden, whom millions of American look up to, was on full display recently. As the Daily Beast reports:

During a “webinar” on Tuesday, an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s National Insider Threat Task Force showed a PowerPoint slide with examples of “insider threats.” Thomas Drake, who exposed part of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program in 2005, is next to Fort Hood killer Nidal Hasan, Navy Yard killer Aaron Alexis, and FBI-agent-turned-Soviet-spy Robert Hanssen.

But it wasn’t just Thomas Drake. Edward Snowden was also on this cartoonish slide: