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Comment by volkk | Hacker News Reader

My guess is that the real comms already do happen outside of Twitter, and that Twitter is simply a recruitment platform/loudspeaker

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Your guess would be 100% correct.

We built huge spy networks only to find out that the terrorists don't even use the internet for their plans. They use burner phones and other non-tech solutions (paper?! omgawdwtf.) because (surprise!) they're harder to track on a systematic level.

Before he was killed Bin Laden communicated with his inner circle only by USB drives transported by sneakernet - his bunker lacked Internet connection but his communications were electronic. I think some of his communication was re-transmitted by his couriers over the Internet though but not through locations that were physically near where he was hiding.

Really, he didn't have internet? I remember his final video and it was so laden with modern political jargon I'm really surprised - I kind of figured he'd spent the decade in hiding surfing political forums.

His communication was two way, not just one way. It was just really slow and labor intensive.

I typed my last comment going from memory. I looked it up and my memory served me well, his bunker didn't have Internet. Looks like his USB drives weren't encrypted though, rookie mistake.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/how-bin-laden-emailed-without-b...

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

""" I am careful in how I use the Internet.

I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see git://git.gnu.org/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation).

I occasionally also browse unrelated sites using IceCat via Tor. Except for rare cases, I do not identify myself to them. I think that is enough to prevent my browsing from being connected with me. IceCat blocks tracking tags and most fingerprinting methods.

I never pay for anything on the Web. Anything on the net that requires payment, I don't do. (I made an exception for the fees for the stallman.org domain, since that is connected with me anyway.) I also avoid paying with credit cards. """

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradecraft

Fortunately, nowadays half the planet's population are Stasi volunteers.

Doesn't he know Tor is completely compromised?

that's news to me.

a cursory google search doesn't show anything substantive (only tor browser vulnerabilities).

are you saying that tor, the protocol, is compromised? what's the basis for your claim?

we do know that state actors can break it at great expense, but that isn't really a statement about tor weakness as much as it's a statement about the resources of state actors. and for a person like RMS who is likely not a state-level threat, his use of Tor probably does provide him with some degree of protection.

It has happened in the past (chosen example: 2014). Not sure if any current vulnerability is public.

https://blog.torproject.org/tor-security-advisory-relay-earl...

https://blog.torproject.org/did-fbi-pay-university-attack-to...

From a certain perspective, he is a "state-level" threat. Not an imminent, physical threat, certainly - this is a threat of a different type. He loudly and vigorously argues and advocates against various government policies and actions (as well as those of the largest corporations most deeply entangled with the state apparatus) and gives advice on how best to resist them.

Weren't those side channel attacks? IE getting the tor browser to leak info over plain internet when connecting to an onion site so the connection could be correlated?

Part of how he was found included that the house he was in was the only one in the area that didn't have a phone line.

Now I'm curious, I wonder how feasible it would be to use acoustic sniffing to hear people like him talking or typing. Some guys infered letters from the sound of keystrokes.

Proof of concept has already been achieved: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/09/snooping_on_t...

Wouldn't you have to be close enough to his location to where he'd be within a bomb's range anyway?

Sure but I'm not talking about killing but dismantling a terrorist network. Having more informations stealthily.

There's a big difference between Osama and your average everyday ISIS wannabe, who absolutely do use internet. Eg https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kb7n4a/isis-messa...

They've been known to use pocket calculators for ciphers and transmit over radio frequencies digit by digit.

Indeed. I would be very surprised if any real planning happened on twitter DMs. That would be unbelievably stupid, with the NSA stuff now being so well known

It's a great way to plant false plans. You don't have to carry them out unless the threat was never mitigated(if it wasn't taken seriously, then you can carry it out for 2x damage: part being the attack itself, the second part being that "they knew and did nothing!").

How would you know if they did know and chose not to do anything to avoid showing they did know?

Well ISIS must have some form of intelligence of their own? Although I have no idea how advanced it would be.

While not quite planning, announcements do occur. Found a large number of accounts connected to the attackers from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Culwell_Center_attack

when it was ongoing.

Minutes before the attack:

> #texasattack: "May Allah accept us as mujahideen."

Minutes after:

> Allahu Akbar!!!! 2 of our brothers just opened fire.

Also saw Salafists retweet an old cartoon by Charlie Hebdo of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hours before the Charlie Hebdo shooting occurred.

I'm divided about this issue. One the one hand, I've seen accounts that glorify the Paris attacks and link to bomb making materials, on the other hand, I've seen lots of video's from Syria and Palestine which does indeed radicalize youth, but is also not directly terrorist propaganda (a lot of this is newsworthy, but does not end up in the news, so it is valuable to share on social media). Should linking to an Anwar al-Awlaki video be grounds for a ban? Remember, these videos are on Youtube.

I like to think back 10-15 years when people had to self-host their websites. Stuff that, back then, would surely get you a knock on the door, slips through daily on social networks. I say: If you can't host it yourself, you can't rely on a third party to host it for you and protect your anonymity.

So yes, chase them underground, and apply more serious tracking to those that are acting more seriously (someone on Telegram writing about terrorism is way more serious than someone on Twitter writing about terrorism). Try to keep social media free of war propaganda. And be careful to not overdo it. America is a country where writing a Facebook post about Apple interspersed with quotes from Fight Club can get you SWATted [1].

[1] http://nyconvergence.com/2011/06/ny-man-uses-fight-club-quot...

Then ghosting would make much more sense, in my opinion, to keep the data just in case some information will get shared that could lead to catching terrorists/recruiters.

Just what I was thinking. Reddit and HN shadowban people without them ever knowing. Twitter probably should too, and allow things like current location/potential plans to be farmed.

It's already common practice for criminals to use encrypted chat system. You may get noobs and fresh recruits but anything serious would happen elsewhere.

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