Big Data Firm Says It Can Link Snowden Data To Changed Terrorist Behavior
npr.org
npr.org
2) The very word "terrorist" is disputed, and depends on your side in any given dispute. It is the "high treason" of the 20th and 21st century, an accusation or insinuation used mainly for political reasons and not for actual utility: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism "In the international community, terrorism has no legally binding, criminal law definition."
3) The fact that 21st century treason is being casually associated with open source is DEEPLY disconcerting to me. I would go to war for a very few things, but any attack on open source is a direct attack on me AFAIC.
It's also safe to assume that a kid in Ukraine is terrorised by Russians or by US/EU depending on which side of the country was he lives.
So, to you Al Qaeda is a terrorist group and I totally get that (to me too). But you have to understand that to Afghans (and a huge load of populations worldwide) the USA/NATO is the terrorist group. That's why what @lectrick said is right I'm afraid.
So either we can assume that all of these parties are terrorists since they indulge in actions of terrorism ?
Ukrainian kids terrorized by US/EU? Really? What are you talking about? Even in the rebel held areas, how has the US/EU EVER terrorized them?
To some Afghans, we could be seen that way, but most of the population in Afghanistan would rather not take their chances with the Taliban (A terrorist group).
Actions of Terrorism. What exactly are they? Admittedly, we have caused more collateral casualties than I'm comfortable with at times in our fight against terror. But innocent civilians are NEVER OUR TARGET. And that is the differentiating factor here. Terrorists aim to take down societies, not governments. Everyone in that society is considered the enemy. Look at Afghanistan... Taliban goes around beheading people of a different sect of their own faith, they behead non-believers as well as government officials. If you aren't for us, then you are against us mentality.
Bin Laden finds a way to fly 2 planes into the twin towers in NYC, killing thousands of innocent people. Not to mention all the previous attempts to blow up those buildings in years prior, lest you forget that.
So yes, there is a difference in what we are doing in the war on terror. Have we executed perfectly? No way. Have we overreached and done things that I disagree with? Yep. But one thing is damn certain, the motivations of our actions are not the same as the terrorists.
This is a site with predominantly US and Western users so Al-Qaeda will always be the terrorists and America the freedom fighters but change the geographic location of the people you are asking and you change the labels being applied.
I'm getting for granted that you are the USA. So in order to avoid never-ending discussions here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0
They look pretty much civilians to me.
ps. You know, the guy who released this video... Is hiding in an Embassy in the UK because he is terrorised by someone who call him a terrorist, food for thought!
As for being up/down-voted. I don't really care, I just state my views, some people like them others do not. It's what makes this community great.
Have a nice evening (it's 22:02 here! GMT+2)
So while the US/NATO armed forces (who display uniforms, have a strict command structure, are bound by international law, etc.) might be seen as an occupation/invasion force, they cannot reasonably called a Terrorist organization.
Terrorist organizations systematically target non-combatants in order to achieve their goals, do not display uniforms or have a command structure that can be entreated with. You cannot make a peace treaty with Al Qaeda for instance, you can with NATO. To act as if both groups are equivalent makes it impossible to have useful discussions about the morality of violence.
There are many people that feel like there is no moral difference between the violence perpetrated by these groups, but that doesn't mean that they can be lumped together into the same sorts of violent activities.
Al Qaeda is very clearly a terrorist group, and no where in that article is it suggested that open source software is either treasonous or related to terrorism, nor does it say the NSA thinks this.
#3: "Instead, al-Qaida has started incorporating more sophisticated open-source code to help disguise its communications. 'This is as close to proof that you can get that these have changed and improved their communications structure post the Snowden leaks,' Ahlberg said."
The insinuation here is that making powerful tools available via open source is dangerous. Don't you see it?
ISIS arguably isn't a terrorist organization anymore, because it is engaging in some sort of nation building. Still their actions are terrible and what most who don't share their particular interpretation of Islam would call "evil".
In general, it's kinda absurd to imagine that anything that helps terrorists is something we don't want to do. Terrorist operations are probably helped by lots of things like cheap availability of computer and communications equipment, low travel costs, access to clean drinking water and food, etc.
Terrorism is an insanely small risk - in 2012 33,000 people died in motor vehicle accidents, which is about 2750 people each month. Compare to 9/11, which was the worst terrorist attack in history, where 3000 people died. Basically, there is accidental death on the scale of 9/11 happening every single month on US roads. And I'm not even saying we need to do something about that - everyone's pretty comfortable with the level of risk they take when driving. It's just not a big flashy risk like the kind that shows up on the news.
Terrorism probably feels riskier because it happens in big clumps. If you were anywhere except a very specific building in New York or a very specific building in Washington, DC on 9/11, you were at pretty much zero risk of dying of terrorism, but a huge fraction of the people in those two places were at extremely high risk for death by terrorism. By that logic, we should be spending a whole lot more on near-earth asteroid defenses and research into how to stop the Yellowstone caldera from exploding, because even though neither of those things is particularly likely to be the thing that kills any of us, if they do go off they'll kill a remarkably large number of people.
I know maybe 7 or so people from NI and two of them are going through the truth and reconciliation process as they had close family members killed - that's a brutal%
Every intelligence service exists at the intersection of two completely opposite goals: in order to fulfill their mandate to protect their country from its enemies, they need as much information about the actions of their enemies as possible. On the other hand, in order to protect their country from themselves, they need to have as light a touch as possible. There is no solution; you have to compromise.
The thing about compromises is that even though they tend to kinda sorta almost make sense when viewed in context, no one is every happy with them. Any large agency is going to employ a substantial number of people who find these compromises distasteful.
This report indicates that Al Qaeda, an organization that no one in their right mind would say should be allowed to operate freely, benefits from these sorts of disclosures. They learn what's vulnerable, they change their behavior, and they become more difficult to fight. What's worse, it's conceivable that the intelligence agency's response could be to increase the intensity of their activity, the better to capture the enemy's new behaviors.
Now imagine the quandary the intelligence agency faces. They try every day to meet mandates that are fundamentally unreconcilable. They employ people who disagree with the compromises at which they've arrived, and each and every one of them could potentially let the cat out of the bag and render their current work useless.
I don't mean this argument to criticize of praise the actions of the NSA. I only suggest that those (Americans) among you who demonize the NSA and advocate for it's removal consider this reframing of the discussion.
The lack of oversight, or at least effective oversight, makes it difficult to trust the efficacy of their supposed tactics. Also if you want to be really pedantic about it how do you suss out causation vs correlation regarding Snowden? The only thing about the NSA that I feel really certain about is they want Snowden punished. That and they publicly lie and lie to congress, we know that too.
Now the first point deserves a response. This demand for proof of effectiveness for various intelligence gathering techniques misses the point of my initial comment. The public doesn't know if cracking this program was a significant source of information. On the other hand, neither does Al Qaeda. Spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt among your enemies is part of role of intelligence gathering, to the point where spreading the same among the population can be acceptable.
Consider the revelation that the NSA is gathering only a relatively small sample of phone records [1]. This information came out through a leak. Why didn't the NSA rebut allegations that they were sucking up every single conversation by revealing this information? It probably wouldn't have saved them in the public eye, but it would have at least dispelled the extremely damaging public perception of the NSA as an unstoppable Big Brother-style surveillance machine that's going to murder you for the contents of your emails, as opposed to an agency that, despite their twisting the letter of the law, is still forced to operate within legal boundaries. Why didn't this report come out to try to at least correct the public's paranoia?
The answer is because doing so would have given the US's enemies guidance on how to run their operations, which would allow them to more effectively evade detection. In this context, this sort of secrecy and fear appears to be a hateful but ultimately necessary part of intelligence: you can't assuage the public without assuaging your enemies.
At the same time, the public still have to be protected from a spy agency, and this is where mandatory oversight and regulation comes into play. While Congress has vowed to implement strengthened oversight over the NSA, the public isn't satisfied because this oversight is performed in secret. I'm sort of prepared to let myself be convinced that this oversight exists, but the truth is that whatever solution is implemented is bound to be unsatisfying for exactly the reason I point out above: hateful secrecy is necessary.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-is...
But who is the enemy, and who defines them? Terrorist watch lists now contain over a million names in the US alone - are all those people plausible terrorists? Spy agencies now routinely record the communications of entire populations, domestic and foreign, and use that information for economic and political gain (why else spy on Petrobras and G20?). Terrorism seems to be the least of their preoccupations given the focus of their spying.
There is definitely a balance to be struck between a spying agency with effective oversight on their tremendous powers, pursuing only that tiny minority considered dangerous enemies who actively plan to attack (worldwide that is probably in the hundreds, or at most the thousands of people), and a spying agency which views surveilling entire populations, assassination en masse, denying travel, subverting encryption, and even spying on and lying to the politicians who oversee them as acceptable.
Unfortunately at present we find ourselves at one extreme of that continuum.
So I don't know why that's a surprise. It's not only the expected outcome, but the desirable outcome.
NSA or not, Snowden has also showed "normal people" that stuff they do on the Internet really isn't very private at all, even if when typing it on their computers alone at home "feels private". So that's a great outcome, too, the fact that people have learned the way the Internet really works, and not have a false perception about it anymore. If we all start using Signal and TextSecure, we'll all be safer from all bad actors.
Or the rest of the West for that matter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Eyes#Future_enlargemen...
I don't think it came as a surprise to terrorist organizations that the NSA was working to break their encryption techniques—just as I'm sure it wouldn't have been a surprise to the Soviets during the Cold War.
The group that was surprised and caught off-guard was the American people.
It's been just over a year since the Snowden leaks. Overhauling an entire communication system likely took more than a year. Ground-up rewrites rarely go that well.
This strikes me more as a publicity grab for this firm than any kind of objective science.
Even if the press would loudly be agreeing over the "fact" that "SNOWDEN PUT US ALL IN DANGER" it would be an instructive lesson in terms of freedom having value by it having a price.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
-- Litany against fear by the Bene Gesserit (Frank Herbert's Dune)
Now I don't doubt that this report that was made by a CIA funded company include a somewhat unbiased view, but maybe in a few years time a independent research group could look into the effect that the NSA surveillance and the Snowden leaks had onto society.
link: http://www.kreativrauschen.com/blog/2008/06/04/data-retentio...
When a reporter uncovers the story of rapes on campus, is it the reporter's fault that the university's reputation is tarnished?
When Snowden exposed that the NSA was (unconstitutionally) spying on every citizen, is it somehow Snoden's fault that terrorists gain an advantage?
"Whatever the reason, Schneier says, al-Qaida's new encryption program won't necessarily keep communications secret, and the only way to ensure that nothing gets picked up is to not send anything electronically. Osama bin Laden understood that. That's why he ended up resorting to couriers."
That basically admits the reality of the situation. They knew all along that the NSA and so on was watching/listening. It is why Osama used couriers.
I highly suspect that the answer is the obvious one:
Any idiot knows not to invent your own crypto algorithms in isolation. They moved from homebrew crypto to modern, widely used standards. This is correcting a technical error they made, nothing more.
To be honest, if anything, this proves how inept the NSA is that they couldn't even break the homebrew crypto in a meaningful way to provide useful intelligence.
https://www.recordedfuture.com/al-qaeda-encryption-technolog...
First point: AlQ is now using well-studied encryption algorithms (possibly in the correct way, but not investigated in this story)
Second point: Some claim about the software not being malware. Could not deduce the technical point they want to make here.
But it is an embarrassing analysis that DOES NOT support their headline-seeking claim.
Wow, that's crazy! I had no idea. Al-Qaida does their own software development? So weird.
Using their own homebrew encryption algorithms is a terrible idea, though. The NSA must have been all over this thing.