Terrorists Mock Bids to End Use of Social Media | Hacker News Reader

Terrorists Mock Bids to End Use of Social Media

nytimes.com

41 pointsbko69 comments

I'm surprised there aren't more reports of honey-pot use, particularly with how easily it is to derive a behavioral patterns of terrorist propagandists.

Such honey-pots would no doubt catch false-positives but it is a known effective means of reconnaissance and sabotage, considering how aggressively and thoroughly they are connected to social media.

Recently Isil issued a warning to all social media propagandists to be safe and vigilant in their online activities (eg: do not use personally identifiable information, use VPNs or Tor, etc), so it stands to reason that their online network and social network is under active attack.

The article cites honey-pot use as one of the reasons that Isil continues to have a persistent online presence, but is it really that prevalent?

There are so many things we can do to combat their online war campaign that doesn't involve poking tech firms to open up encryption or open up private access channels for law enforcement, and honestly I think the various governments aren't being forthcoming or cooperative in their online adversarial campaigns. One could even say they're being obstructionist or obtuse, with one-sided demands rather than a progressive partnership.

Where are our NSA pundits? Are they too busy with economic espionage against their patrons' opponents? Does the MSM really have nothing further to add other than "tech firms are lazy"?

The purposes of getting tech firms to open up encryption or private access channels is not for fighting the online shenanigans of alleged terrorists.

> Such honey-pots would no doubt catch false-positives but it is a known effective means of reconnaissance and sabotage, considering how aggressively and thoroughly they are connected to social media.

The less mature sort of civil libertarian (I consider myself the mature sort of civil libertarian) would no doubt oppose honey pots. Can't you imagine it now? 'The government has been running a secret program to entrap people!'

> Where are our NSA pundits? Are they too busy with economic espionage against their patrons' opponents?

NSA's job is not economic espionage, and NSA does not often take public stances. It does its job quietly; if it has ideas for how it could contribute to the fight against ISIL, then it would probably not bandy them about the media.

There has been a bad record of FBI entrapment programs where they provided the radicalisation, the organisational structure, and even the guns or explosives to people who might not have come into contact with actual terrorist groups.

https://theintercept.com/2015/02/26/fbi-manufacture-plots-te...

I thought NSA pretty much owned the TOR egress nodes. TOR is a honeypot.

"But as the 335 versions of the pro-Islamic State Twitter account demonstrate, technology companies are dealing with a tenacious adversary."

- Really? Tenacious Adversary? Because they create new accounts once old ones are closed?

Not as tenacious as the bod who is now manually creating @TurMedia336 to @TurMedia99999999.

But, one might have thought that Titter would have blocked creation of these accounts already.

“Resolve means depriving jihadists of virtual territory, just as we work to deprive them of actual territory,”

The problem with that line of reasoning is that we good people are poised to lose some of our "virtual territory" i.e. freedoms too as a collateral damage in this fight.

At this point, the NYT is just a mouthpiece for the executive branch. They've been pushing a ridiculous anti-encryption, anti-privacy agenda since Glenn Greenwald.

I'm apparently a little out of the loop on this - can you point me to some examples?

I was generally thinking about the things Glenn Greenwald describes in his book, [No Place to Hide](http://www.amazon.com/No-Place-Hide-Snowden-Surveillance-ebo...). For example, even though Greenwald is a respect journalist and regular contributor to the Guardian, when the Snowden scandal first broke, the NYT insisted on referring to him only as a 'blogger.' They also published a lot of op-eds bashing Greenwald's work as dangerous and non-journalistic.

Sorry, I don't have any better links or sources right now. I'm on mobile.

> and text messages discovered on one of the attackers’ phones suggested that the attackers were not even using encryption.

Did you miss that part in the article?

No, I didn't miss it. I'll admit that the article isn't directly calling for an end to encryption, but, at least the way I read it, there's some subtext about it. It seems like they're approaching encryption with the assumption that it's bad but we can't do anything about it, not that encryption is a good tool being used for evil.

> A trickier issue is presented by the encryption deployed by Apple, Facebook, Google and a range of smaller services that thwart law enforcement’s ability to access a target’s communications, even with a court order.

Why do they describe it as 'thrwarting' law enforcement? It's not thrwarting anything, it's just not providing them a back door.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but this article feels like it has something between the lines.

Most journalists probably don't know the first thing about encryption or the internet in general, so it's not surprising that they would fail to represent the views commonly expressed here.

It's their job to properly research it before writing about it.

I'm fine with cracking down on ISIS propaganda as long as we also crack down on the propaganda of hawks in the West. ISIS is bad, no question there. But the US invasion of Iraq has caused more deaths than the fighting with ISIS. We need to stop pretending that these actions are different. Killing people is killing people even if it's done by militaries at the orders of men in suits.

It's debatable. Do you stand aside and look the other way and say, that's their lot in the world, or do you do something.

It's not an was call. If you do nothing people die. If you try to do something people will die. The idea is to pave a better path to the future.

To be sure, going into Iraq was a fools errand, but it's more difficult to make the call about lets say strife in Africa, or the Caucasus, etc.

Or even today, do we say, forget Syria. Seal it up, let them sort things out and condemn a whole country's population to great suffering?

> It's debatable. Do you stand aside and look the other way and say, that's their lot in the world, or do you do something.

> It's not an was call. If you do nothing people die. If you try to do something people will die. The idea is to pave a better path to the future.

This was the propaganda used to excuse invading Iraq, but it's incredibly naive to believe it.

> Or even today, do we say, forget Syria. Seal it up, let them sort things out and condemn a whole country's population to great suffering?

That's exactly what we'd be doing if they weren't sitting in the way of fossil fuel transportation routes.

It's ridiculous to claim that we're doing this to reduce the suffering of people in Syria. The US has supplied Israel with bombs that have been used to kill Syrian civilians for more than half a century, yet suddenly we care about the suffering of Syrians now? Yeah, right.

So are you saying countries should retreat from Syria and let things fall where they may, or are you saying we should get more involved?

Of course countries act selfishly. It's crazy to think otherwise. Everyone will act selfishly. Europe the ME, etc. want stability in Syria selfishly, but coincidentally it's a good thing.

> So are you saying countries should retreat from Syria and let things fall where they may, or are you saying we should get more involved?

I'm saying that our current involvement in Syria is worse than not being involved, and talking about Syria as if "helping" is even an option our leaders are considering is naive, and buying into the propaganda.

I can see a number of ways we could be involved positively in Syria, but we're not, and we're not going to be.

> “When Twitter says, ‘We can’t do this,’ I don’t believe that,” said Hany Farid, chairman of the computer science department at Dartmouth College ... “There’s no fundamental technology or engineering limitation,” he said. “This is a business or policy decision. Unless the companies have decided that they just can’t be bothered.”

Can anyone comment whether this is true or not? It seems rather trivial to create new accounts and post data. Is it just whack-a-mole or is there something more sophisticated that goes on?

There can always be some checking that happens as part of creating a new account.

Remember that to be effective, the follower needs to be able to find the new account when the old one is closed. They will do this by searching for an obvious keyword (in this case TurMedia or IslamicState), so checking the username against a block list of known terms previously used by terrorists should catch it.

For example, FB has a real names policy - try opening a FB account with a stupid name and see what happens - its not that hard.

A "real names policy" is not appropriate to every situation, since it is inherently hostile to users. Some have even criticized its use at FB.

While quite true, that is a "business and policy decision" for the most part.

I agree, but the point I was trying to make (perhaps unclearly), was that the username can be checked against a list of blocked patterns at account creation time.

FB has a "real looking names" policy, which has little to do with the names on people's government ID unless they get reported.

(And of course, the more lawless the area, the less likely someone is to even have an official identity)

If it's easy to create new accounts, then closing old ones is a losing battle for law enforcement. If it's hard to create new accounts, Twitter's business might just fall apart.

I wonder if an effective method would be to apply some sort of "shadowban" on the Twitter accounts instead of closing them.

wouldn't it be pretty obvious to them when they cannot see the shadow banned account from other accounts? I know people who do similar on reddit, keep a second/third/etc account around to periodically check their main if they should notice no replies or such.

How restricted can new accounts be made so that they have to pass a review without impacting new accounts to the point no one wants to use the service?

Why scramble to shut them down? Isn't this a valuable source of information? Wouldn't we want to know what they are saying, who is engaging with them, etc.? Why push them further underground?

Hell, why not just make a social network JUST for terrorists with no threat of shutting anybody down and then just tap into that info?

Because propaganda actually works. We're not trying to push down the actual terrorists; we're trying to win information war waged inside the minds of potential future terrorists.

You would think that people aren't that stupid. I would think that too. But after witnessing the whole country (Russia) going down the rabbit hole of paranoid madness with just a couple of years of propaganda, I don't think that anymore.

Now you've done it, any second now you'll get a whole army of pro-russia trolls coming in accusing you of bias and having your eyes closed and what not.

I didn't think that was a massive thing, until a girl I went to primary school with in NZ (who, it turns out, is ethnic Russian) jumped on me for daring to suggest that Russia's paid internet trolls are a bit of a joke. There was no reasoning, she just kept quoting zerohedge and RT links at me, ignoring anything I said. I just blocked her, but it was so weird to actually be confronted with the effects of this propoganda.

On the flip side, its just as easy to write off dissenting opinions as 'propaganda'.

Just curious, but what do you think the world's opinion of CNN is?

Answer: not unbiased news...

wait, anybody actually things about any US big media (cnbc, cnn, fox and whatnot) to be NOT biased and quite heavily? they are all under murdoch empire, no?

generally, within boundaries of popular news sources, one should use a foreign source to get information for a given country. now finding which one is +-balanced for given country is a tricky thing, and probably not constant as time goes by

All media is biased, etc. The important thing is to understand the bias when you're reading.

To sibling: only Fox News is owned by Murdoch. You can google for who owns what instead of guessing. MSNBC is biased to the (American) left and CNN is biased to insipidness. All are biased to the establishment and to distract, sensationalism.

Fox has been kicking CNN etc.'s asses in a commercial sense for decades now. We'd be fools to think that hasn't affected the other networks' reporting. We'd also be fools to think that Fox and MSNBCSBCNC operate from different ends of a spectrum. It's all USA all the time, on both networks. For an alternative try RT or Al Jazeera.

Of course all media is biased.

It doesn't mean that it's equally biased.

Oh, I know some people who actually managed these guys. And a lot of SMM people who were involved in projects associated with pro-government political forces. Every one of them a nice guy who understands it all, but just needs cash in a harsh industry. At least, that's what they say.

Is ZH part of the propaganda operation? I thought it was just a freelance conpiracy theorist running clickbait for the lunatic right.

Come to think of it, maybe Trump is a Russian agent. It would explain a lot.

And clearly the best way to win the information war against an adversary who says we've traded away our values for comfort, riches, and decadence is to throw away the First Amendment because "propaganda works."

Keep in mind, we're not just talking about accounts used by actual terrorists to coordinate actual attacks. We're talking about "pro-ISIS" Twitter accounts.

How will we decide who is pro-ISIS? I propose a system of hearings, with the most important ones conducted by a senate committee. The most important question at these hearings will be "are you now or have ever been a sympathizer with Islamic State." If they "fail" the hearing we could put them in some kind of database used by employers and government hiring agents and so forth. A sort of blacklist, if you will.

And anyone on the blacklist doesn't get to use corporate media platforms. It's not a First Amendment violation, you see, because it's VOLUNTARY. Just ask these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist

Calling for mass murder isn't a valid case of free speech.

And even if it were, Twitter can ban accounts for any reason.

"Calling for mass murder isn't a valid case of free speech." To be pedantic, yes it is, free speech isn't conditional on the message.

Your second statement is true, 1st amendment applies only to the government ability to restrict speech.

I should have said "isn't a valid case of legal free speech in the United States".

The first amendment applies to the government, not to private corporations.

But in this case the government is coercing companies, which violates the first amendment. See https://theintercept.com/2015/12/01/court-ruling-against-chi...

Twitter deciding that they don't want ISIS supporters using their application violates nobody's 1st Amendment rights.

And twitter deciding to allow supporters to use the application isn't unconstitutional either.

Right right, just like the Hollywood blacklist didn't violate anyone's First Amendment rights. (You could have at least read to the end of my comment, lol)

It was a House committee, not Senate. It's in the name ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_C...

I answered the question "why shut them down, when they provide valuable information".

I didn't say that I want all pro-terrorist accounts to be shut down. I only explained the reasons behind it.

The fact that some position has valid reasons behind it doesn't mean that there aren't reasons against it. It also doesn't mean that it's necessarily the right position.

Please, don't argue with a position you assume some commenter expresses and argue with a position someone actually expresses. Case in point: I don't know whether we should or shouldn't close all pro-terrorist accounts. And I know about first amendment, thank you.

The US Gov. also sees it as a useful tool and now can use it against its own people: https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-3695702701/apple...

I can't remember where I read the article, but it summarized it as thus. Al Queda was a big threat, but you hardly ever heard of people being radicalized by them. ISIS on the other hand is clearly quite efficient at radicalizing people though. Part of the reason for this is their relatively large social media presence, and their videography is actually quite decent for what they do. If you compare ISIS and Al Queda in this respect, ISIS is definitely "easier to get into" I'd say.

I would want to compare the numbers with the two during similar timelines; their ramp up, once they became known internationally, once they became a big enough concern to directly target, and then on their decline. Plus I would wonder if there's something along the lines of the new one feeding off the older.

Back when al-Qaeda was the focus of attention, you heard plenty about people, including Americans and other Westerners, being radicalized by them and/or via a system of radical madrassas (mostly in Pakistan) and radical networks (throughout the world) associated with them and their ideology.

It's true that the mechanisms were different, because social media wasn't a big thing at the time: John Walker Lindh was radicalized before the services that really made "social media" a global force existed.

> Part of the reason for this is their relatively large social media presence, and their videography is actually quite decent for what they do.

Not to take any merit from your argument but AQ was good in recruiting online at least for its franchise or affiliate in Yemen under the leadership of the US-born Anwar Awlaki. This is the man who made online propaganda and media blitz as a core element of Islamic terrorism and Jihadism strategy.

Also, please note that Al-Qaeda in Iraq was the progenitor of ISIS but they broke away due to ideological and strategical differences with Ayman Zwahiri the No. 1 AQ leader and they were very hardened under AQ sponsorship.

> Also, please note that Al-Qaeda in Iraq was the progenitor of ISIS

It wasn't so much a "progenitor of ISIS" as the name taken by the group that later called itself "the Islamic State in Iraq" (and later still, "the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria", and most recently simply "the Islamic State") during the period in which that group (which had been around quite some time previously) adopted the al-Qaeda brand.

Yes it's disappointing to see the focus on "bad" speech rather than on violence, because it makes the goals of Western government authorities a little too obvious. If they actually wanted to discourage sectarian violence, they'd be happy to have an easily searchable online resource to which the goatfuckers voluntarily post useful information like techniques, PII, etc.

Authorities' current efforts seem to be more of an attempt to sweep this stuff under the rug. If all this is hidden from the general public, we might be less inclined to scrutinize their bullshit. For all the money and human rights they've consumed here, and the hundreds of thousands killed over there, their various strategies seem to have made the alleged problem worse in every respect. That seems like something we should talk about?

The best solution would be to build a public platform for Twitter-like communication.

This would give people the same free speech protections they have on public streets and town squares, which they don't have when using private platforms like Instagram or Facebook.

It would also give law enforcement the ability to do their jobs.

We have a public postal service, why not a public social media platform?

Wouldn't it be great if this public platform had a completely open API, without the restrictions that Twitter puts in place to artificially limit access in order to create demand?

Remember the good old days when 3rd party developers basically built everything good about Twitter?

I am not trying to attack you personally. Please don't take this the wrong way. I just want to understand... why would a recruiter for a militant (likely illegal) organization use a government-owned public platform?

The only possible reason for a recruiter to join is if there are potential recruits there. With USPS, a recruiter would have the ability to send mail to John Doe or current resident. There is some kind of targeting available as well. But that is besides the point. The main problem is how do we get everyone to be on this new public platform?

I think if we can get enough people to sign up for this public platform, it could be feasible. There are still privacy implications of such a public utility though. When you connect to the service, it can keep track of at least your device ID (trivial with apps) and your IP address. Assuming everyone is on this service, the service could reliably track who you are with at what times.

I understand that there already exist "shadow" profiles for me on various networks . However, I do not like the idea of an online identity that is connected to my real, legal identity. what if someone else gets a hold of my account while I am away for a few days and starts posting pro Sinn Féin propaganda on it? Will I get flagged for terrorism? How do we know handle all these false positives? I'll go ahead and create a straw man here that is ridiculous: how about we require people to prick their finger and submit their blood sample when they start using a new computer or when they have been inactive for ten minutes?

You've answered your own question. Terrorist organizations wouldn't use a public platform just like how they don't currently have recruitment booths in Times Square.

If there are privacy implications those would be handled by legislature and judicial oversight like the rest of our public infrastructure.

I don't see why a public platform for social media would need any sort of real life identify verification.

Instead of having a private company decide who gets to say what, we have public representatives handle the curation. The FCC has been regulating TV and radio for many decades and as far as I can tell it is still relatively easy to criticize the government over public airwaves.

States are too small. In the information age, governments are (still) limited by territory while information knows no borders. That is why twitter is larger than any governments own social network can ever be.

Steam & petrol engines made many things obsolete - so are networked computers doing now.

"Printing Press":"Nation State"::"Internet":"Post-Nation State"

I get it, I've read McLuhan as well, but it's our duty as responsible members of society to work to smooth this transition.

Disruption is fine for toothpaste and frozen pizza but tends to be really disastrous for government.

The author keeps slipping in references to encryption but I don't really see the connection. Clearly it has little to do with terrorists broadcasting messages intended to be read by everyone on social media.

Don't delete their accounts, shadowban them.

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