French Police Report On Paris Attacks Shows No Evidence Of Encryption... So NY Times Invents Evidence Itself
from the reporting! dept
They used only new phones that they would then discard, including several activated minutes before the attacks, or phones seized from their victims.That's not all that surprising, of course. People have known about burner phones for ages. But the thing that stood out for me was the desperate need of the NY Times reporters to insist that there must be encryption used by the attackers, despite the near total lack of evidence of any such use. Immediately after the attacks, law enforcement and intelligence officials started blaming encryption based on absolutely nothing. Senator John McCain used it as an excuse to plan legislation that would force backdoors into encryption. And Rep. Michael McCaul insisted that the Paris attackers used the encrypted Telegram app, despite no one else saying that. In fact, for months, the only thing we'd heard was that they used unencrypted SMS to alert each other that the attacks were on, and made almost no effort to hide themselves.
But, amazingly, the NY Times takes evidence of a lack of encryption... to mean there must be encryption:
According to the police report and interviews with officials, none of the attackers’ emails or other electronic communications have been found, prompting the authorities to conclude that the group used encryption. What kind of encryption remains unknown, and is among the details that Mr. Abdeslam’s capture could help reveal.But... that's not how encryption works. If they're using encrypted emails, the emails don't disappear. You still can see that they exist, and the metadata of who sent messages to whom remains. It's just that you can't read the contents of the emails. This is bogeyman thinking about encryption, where people think it does something it doesn't actually do. Sure, it's possible that the attackers used some sort of secretive way to communicate, but then the issue isn't encryption, but rather that they figured out how to hide the method by which they communicated. Or, you know, they just talked about stuff in person.
And then there's this:
One of the terrorists pulled out a laptop, propping it open against the wall, said the 40-year-old woman. When the laptop powered on, 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. Her description matches the look of certain encryption software, which ISIS claims to have used during the Paris attacks.OH MY! "A bunch of lines, like lines of code"?!?!?! Must be encryption! Or, you know, Linux. Or some other system that doesn't start with a graphical user interface. And even if it was encryption, then he wouldn't be looking at it in encrypted form. To read encrypted messages you decrypt them first. Nothing in this paragraph above makes any sense at all as "proof" of encryption. It just seems like proof of the reporters' technology ignorance.
It may very well turn out that the attackers used encryption. It very likely will be true in the future that attackers and terrorists will use encryption. But, this crazy moral panic going on these days where anything that people can't understand "must be encryption!" is reaching insane levels.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: encryption, evidence, journalism, paris attacks
Companies: ny times
Reader Comments
The First Word
“Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
A: Both are filled to the rafters with tools.
Q: How is reading the NY Times like watching a mime?
A: Both involve someone trying to convince you that something that doesn’t exist actually does.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
With burner phones, encryption is less critical because it is difficult to trace the phone to specific person. By regularly buying and ditching burner phones and careful sharing of the numbers it is very difficult to tie all the less ends together.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Terrorists communicate via personal conversations. Therefore, we must make it illegal to have personal conversations without a representative of the government present.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
The word you're looking for is Telescreens.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
You are under arrest
"Smoking Marijuana"
"What? I don't do drugs.. there are no drugs here!!!"
"Correct. Since we didn't find any, that's how we know you smoked it all"
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: You are under arrest
"What for?"
"Whatever I want."
"What? There is no evidence of crime here!!"
"Correct. Since we didn't find any, that's how we know you've hidden or destroyed the evidence."
Insane and far reaching. Good thing law enforcement doesn't do that, right. Oh wait.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: You are under arrest
- Smoking imaginary Marijuana. Three years. How bout you?
- I killed a pink elephant.
- Man. That's cold.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: You are under arrest
Everyone maintained a serious mien, but everyone understood it was a farce, above all the boys of the convoy, who were the simplest sort of fellows. At the Novosibirsk Transit Prison in 1945 they greeted the prisoners with a roll call based on cases. “So and so! Article 58-1a, twenty-five years.” The chief of the convoy guard was curious: “What did you get it for?” “For nothing at all.” “You’re lying. The sentence for nothing at all is ten years.”
—— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (Архипелаг ГУЛАГ)
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: You are under arrest
Now the legal system judges me, saying "tusk, tusk". They should not just switch U for I all the time.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
We just need a little more access, and then you can all be safe. How many times can we hear this and stop swallowing it?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
There were people decades before that who knew invading Vietnam wasn't going to do anything to protect America.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
Nu-uh! You take that back! We fought them over there so that we wouldn't have to fight them over here! If we hadn't gone over there and whipped them we'd all be wearing red stars and speaking Vietnamese right now. How would you like that?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
That whole domino effect...a bunch of malarkey.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Steganography - an overlooked concept
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Steganography - an overlooked concept
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Steganography - an overlooked concept
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Steganography - an overlooked concept
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
You can thank Congress for overturning the Smith-Mundt Act with the National Defense Authorization Act that for the first time since 1948 legally allowed the government to spread it for public consumption.
The NYT is one of those government mouthpieces for that. If nothing else, it has ruined their creditability.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Fox News Continues its nonsensical "Lets Break Encryption" Tirade
Similar to what Mike wrote about the NYT: "But the thing that stood out for me was the desperate need of the NY Times reporters to insist that there must be encryption used by the attackers, despite the near total lack of evidence of any such use." Fox News seems to believe, without any positive evidence that there must be a wealth of en encryptic information on th iPhone. For all we know, there may be no information on the iPhone.
It seems that the real purpose behind "breaking" encryption on this one iPhone, is not for the information contained, but for the precedent of being able to "break" encryption for any whimsical purpose identified by law enforcement. After, all - as Fox News puts it - we have to arrest those evil pedophiles that Apple is helping hide.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
There was no image, no Internet
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Terrorists are creating the Matrix. Time to sue them for copyright infringement.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
No wonder our anti-terrorism task forces fail so hard.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
ny times continues to give sterling testimony for the dissolution of the newspaper business.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Lines on a screen...
I AM A HACKER, NOT A TERRORIST
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Lines on a screen...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Wouldn't surprise me if he had a Matrix screensaver and this idiot associated the green falling characters with encrypted lines of code.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Expert witness
You mean Arabic script?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Expert witness
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Question
"But... that's not how encryption works. If they're using encrypted emails, the emails don't disappear."
I'm no expert but either I'm missing something or the author. Can somebody explain?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Question
You're talking about encrypting your filesystem, not the data you're sending out. Windows isn't showing data there because it can't recognize the data it's seeing (because it's encrypted). It can't even tell where files start or stop, etc. and figures it's just malformed data storage.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Question
The author is talking about encrypted communications. The data on your android is encrypted, and therefore unreadable. But if you mailed your android with its encrypted data to another person, an interceptor may not be able to read what's on the device, but they can read the to and from labels on the envelope the device was mailed in. It's analogous to sending encrypted files over the internet. An interceptor can still read the to and from headers, but they can't read the file.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Just sayin...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: FOX news are not allowed to operate in Canada
Fox news doesn't operate in Canada because they don't want to. The requirement that they can't just make stuff up is what has dissuaded them from operations.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
That is not correct.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/foxcanada.asp
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
FBI and FOIA
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
News?
Few others do - stenography posing as journalism has a limited future.
Fox News: an oxymoron
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Gibberish or Script or something tangible?
FARSI?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Or, you know, maybe Arabic script ...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Frogs VS shotguns
Um, like, ya mean they all wore wrist watches....
Wow, super co-ordinated and massively organized Terrorists!!!!! How will we ever defeat such a super villain bad-guy gang??
I think this is just revenge on the Frenchies for not playing ball with Bush in Afghanistan. Remember American Fries?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Frogs VS shotguns
When people we try to kill fight us at home, and those might have used actual wrist watches, that makes the irony complete!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
At some point people are going to clue into the overarching propaganda meme,
So either you code for a fortune 500, or you are a member of an undesirable social class. Your code is degenerate art. Your speech, unamerican. Your life subhuman. You are a "hacker". "one of THEM".
They are doing this to ghetto-ize the Internet in favor of channelized box network services. There is no reason to channelize, but to isolate transit for one set of communications from another. It doesn't matter what you call it: zero rating, teredo, or advanced edge hosting. The purpose of it is to elevate the speech of the few over the speech of the many.
So Congress puppets a popular meme. Much like the judges tried at Nuremberg puppeted a popular meme. The reason they get away with it is because industrious young men think that work solves this problem. But it isn't about the work, or the law, or money. These fucks have a problem with YOU.
The sooner we get that, the sooner the Internet will have a second revolution. We need to invert the matrix. Wrap the tyranny of psycho-narcissistic-perpetualism in a cyst of code. Create systems that make these tyrannies apparent for what they are, so that when our krystal nacht comes, we may be armed to defend ourselves.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: At some point people are going to clue into the overarching propaganda meme,
[ link to this | view in chronology ]