ISIS Supporters Abandon U.S. Encryption Tools As Apple-FBI Fight Rages 162
blottsie writes: Islamic State militants and supporters are promoting strong encryption tools from outside the United States that the American government cannot touch with legislation. In the last month, Islamic State supporters have promoted security software from Finland, Romania, America, France, the Czech Republic, Canada, Panama, Germany, Switzerland, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and other nations, a Daily Dot review found. The international availability of encryption technology, of which Islamic State militants are well aware, underscores FBI Director James Comey's long-held desire to build an international legal regime to deal with the problems posed by encryption, what he calls "going dark."
Give them ideas (Score:1)
Israel's bombing of an iraq nuclear reactor basically started the weaponized nuclear program in iraq: http://972mag.com/the-myth-of-... [972mag.com]
Same goes for politicans demanding to ban encryption because terrorists could use it. The paris terrorists didn't use encryption. But ISIS now will make sure they will use encryption from now on.
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Make sure you read the full article. It's quite enlightening, especially the part about how Saddam determined Iraq needed an insider at the IAEA in order to find out how it operated, what it knew, and how best to keep their program hidden from them.
Not dark. (Score:3)
The international availability of encryption technology, of which Islamic State militants are well aware, underscores FBI Director James Comey's long-held desire to build an international legal regime to deal with the problems posed by encryption, what he calls "going dark."
Almost all of the data the FBI is interested in was already supposed to be inaccessible to them. So maybe encryption should be called, "going legit".
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Yes, that.
Re:Not dark. (Score:5, Insightful)
But seriously, encryption is for the government what a time-locked fridge is for a fatso. They just can't help themselves, they got no impulse control, they need help. Encryption is the solution to help a government that can't help themselves.
Reaction Gifs (Score:2)
Sometimes I wish slashdot permitted embedded images, cause things like this just beg to for a nice big Nelson HA HA.
We need a new FBI director. (Score:4, Insightful)
The current one is shaking his fist at a storm. Why can't we hire someone who has some common sense about technology?
You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, encryption is here to stay--and there's nothing you can do about it.
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Buuuuut SPYING is HARD *humph*
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This may be a sign that the current efforts at quantum computers are finally paying off. And he wants everyone to trust encryption that is breakable by anyone with a big enough budget.
Can't roll their own? (Score:5, Insightful)
Islamic State supporters have promoted security software from Finland, Romania, America, France, the Czech Republic, Canada, Panama, Germany, Switzerland, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and other nations, a Daily Dot review found.
For the people that love (falsely) claiming that they came up w/ the number system and zero, it's fascinating that they have to promote encryption software from the above countries - ALL non-Muslim - to protect their jihad-plotting communications from being broken into. Can't they get encryption software from Islamic paradises, like Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Emirates, Iran, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, et al? Or (gasp), even roll their own in their labs in Raqqa, Mosul, Sirte...
bingo (Score:1)
the entire premise seems doubtful. we are feed disinformation. wmd comes to mind.
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Canamerica?
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Quit it with your American exceptionalism, it is wrong headed and false, America categorically is referred in a different manner by the various countries and cultures stuck with sharing that land mass with citizens of the United States of America. That is a fact, quit with the bullshit of the United States of America and it's definitions of anything being the only one there is, go away with your childish spelling and stop with any kind of claims to intellectual dominance, you numb nuts can not even manage
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Quite the rant. A little bit of it is actually accurate. But doesn't change the fact that the continent is not called "America" and that citizens of the USA are called "Americans".
America redirects to "United States". Feel free to read the article, too, if you like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Here is "North America": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] And as a bonus, "South America": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And also from the Wikipedia intro: "A continent is one of several very large l
Re: Can't roll their own? (Score:3)
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Not on any map I have ever seen in my life. Combining the two continents of North America and South America would be just about as ridiculous and illogical as combining Africa and Eurasia.
Re: Can't roll their own? (Score:2)
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You immediately repeat the exact same american exceptionlism, my view was derived from an excellent article that actually spoke to various academic from the various countries that form the 'Americas' you of course point to en.wikipedia again and again, so yeah Spanish and Portuguese are also languages from the 'Americas' as are many original nation languages. Let's be blunt history emphatically proves you wrong, because members of the original nation refereed to the land mass in their own way for tens of t
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en.wikipedia is not usa.wikipedia, it is just English- the main language of many countries.
You are waaaaay over the top.
Re: Can't roll their own? (Score:2)
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The concept of a continent is slightly arbitrary, but they are just large, mostly separate land masses.... so there are 6 of them (or 7 if you consider Greenland to be big enough, which few people do). I have never seen ANY reference to Central America being a continent... it is not large and certainly not separate, disconnected, or a distinct physical area. North and South America are, independently, very large, and highly disconnected.
Europe is not a continent, neither is Asia. It is one land mass with
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They did. Used it, too, until Snowden announced to the world that NSA had broken it.
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Way to screw yourself, FBI (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Way to screw yourself, FBI (Score:5, Informative)
More than that, Apple to date has been handing over information which they actually had in their possession... iCloud data and so forth... in response to valid warrants and subpoenas. It was specifically the FBI's abuse of the all writs act, demanding that they rebuild iOS in order to introduce a security-crippling backdoor, to which Apple objected; not cooperation with law enforcement in general.
With their current overreach, and the public spectacle they decided to make out of it, they not only cut themselves off from any information that would have been on the phones themselves in the future; they've pretty much assured that anyone using an iPhone as part of a nefarious endeavor will make sure not to upload anything to iCloud going forward. I seem to recall a fable about killing the goose that lays golden eggs.
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There are actually many good reasons to do local backups (non-iCloud) through iTunes. An
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Re:Way to screw American Companies, FBI (Score:3)
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It's that law enforcement mindset of demanding compliance rather than asking for cooperation.
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The FBI is screwing over the American economy really. NO big company, foreign or domestic that cares about their security will use any American product. Heck, even Apple might decide to simply leave the US, it has enough cash to relocate all it's core designers and developers and their extended families to some other place.
Dear ISIS.... (Score:3)
ROT13 is still uncracked by the US government and will forever stay safe to use.
Even the worlds best encryption experts can not break ROT13.
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I encrypt everything as a Perl program.
Unfortunately it's then also uncrackable even by me.
Here we go again... (Score:1)
Oh, thats right, those terrible people (the TERORISTS) that want to kill all of us for no reason. Hold on, maybe there is a reason after all. Maybe they are fed up of US,UK bombs dropping on their heads over the last decades.
Heres a thought... a logical one I think... instead of trying to monitor all communications and create a great deal of internet collateral damage, we just STOP FUCKING BOMBING OTHER COUNTRIES!!!!!!! then maybe we won't need to watch our backs all the fucking time. We'll also regain th
Re:Here we go again... (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe the topic is more complicated than Western bombing causing terrorism.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:cheating at the game. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:cheating at the game. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but while there are definitely unforeseen consequences in some of those events, we didn't "invent" communism as a threat. Communism did that all by themselves. Communism from the beginning was a theory that expected the export of revolution, and violent revolution at that. It was right and proper to fight it head on. While workers were certainly being exploited by owners, there are still other ways than exporting violence.
Now, if you were to suggest that it is possible that fighting monsters makes it easier to make a monster out of yourself, I would not disagree. However, let's not lose ourselves in the blame game and mistake cause for effect. There are things you fight against because they are wrong, but there is also a battle within to ensure that you don't become just as bad. There are two different things.
Losing the second battle doesn't mean the first was wrong to fight. If someone was to attack my wife, I would be 100% right to get that person away from her, and put him in a position that he could not hurt her again by knocking him on his ass.
However, if I was then to go burn his house down and torture and then kill his family because I was so consumed by rage that I wanted to end his entire genetic line, then I've gone too far.
In the second "part" of the scenario one could certainly suggest to me that I have done worse to this person than he ever did to me, but don't tell me that I had no right to end the initial threat that he posed. The question instead is one of self-control and perspective.
Should we have done everything possible to end Communism, including supporting dictators? I don't think so. Should we have opposed Communism directly and without compromise for the evils in that system? Absolutely yes. We made the right decision, we just failed to avoid entering the mud with the pigs.
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However, if I was then to go burn his house down and torture and then kill his family because I was so consumed by rage that I wanted to end his entire genetic line, then I've gone too far.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
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The American Revolution did not start from the expectation of violence. There had been tensions growing ever since the end of the French and Indian War where a number of colonists tried to work with the mother country to obtain peaceful redress which was not forthcoming.
There is no question that the American Revolution was a cousin to the French Revolution which then became one of the models for Communist revolution, but again, it is a matter of scale and goals.
Communism's goal was violent revolution from
Re:cheating at the game. (Score:4, Informative)
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the US is a country spending nearly 1.4 trillion dollars per year on defense. It dwarfs the spending of the next 7 largest countries combined.
I wonder how much of that is actually spent on defense and how much is spent on offense
Promoting but for what purpose? (Score:2)
going dark (Score:4, Interesting)
It's about time to tell the US to feck off (Score:2)
US acronym agencies like the CIA, NSA, FBI, IRS, etc. have had things their own way for far too long. It's made them lazy, incompetent and stupid.
Remember the Secret Service yahoos who were too busy screwing Colombian whores to do their job? They're the tip of the iceberg. Now the FBI and the rest of the lazy bastards want back doors into every phone and computer on the planet because they refuse to do the hard, slow, dangerous work of infiltrating groups like ISIS, or turning existing members into willi
Good luck (Score:2)
Finding an encryption scheme that isn't already backdoor'd by the CIA.
AFAIK the US/CIA has corrupt deals with all the known for-profit crypto suppliers.
http://mediafilter.org/caq/cry... [mediafilter.org]
https://www.schneier.com/blog/... [schneier.com]
Sure, they might abandon U.S. encryption (Score:2)
But they will never abandon U.S. Dollars [slate.com]
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How about if they start posting selfies with geotags spoofed with the location of the nearest MSF hospital?
Analysts will double check the location to verify that the target is legit before sending off a drone. After all the blown up wedding parties in Afghanistan, the military is trying to avoid those mistakes.
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Re:Ain't gonna stop a hellfire missile.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Analysts will double check the location to verify that the target is legit before sending off a drone.
That's a good one...their check will be, "Are they brown and in the Middle East? Then we're good to go."
After all the blown up wedding parties in Afghanistan, the military is trying to avoid those mistakes.
They're only trying to avoid the publicity.
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And they are doing such a swell job, too! /sarc
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I don't think that word thinks what you think it means.
Oh, were you being sarcastic?
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Oh, were you being sarcastic?
Not based on the story I read about.
Air Force General Hawk Carlisle, head of Air Combat Command, explains how the mission was made possible. âoeThe guys that were working down out of Hurlburt, they're combing through social media and they see some moron standing at this command. And in some social media, open forum, bragging about the command and control capabilities for Daesh, ISIL. And these guys go: 'We got an in.' So they do some work, long story short, about 22 hours later through that very building, three [Joint Direct Attack Munitions] take that entire building out.â
http://www.techlicious.com/blog/isis-terrorist-selfie-bombing/ [techlicious.com]
I'm making the presumption that the analysts spent some time searching for the specific location and not trying to find some misplaced bombs.
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The efficiency of the US military's checking of information is well reported. http://www.doctorswithoutborde... [doctorswit...orders.org]
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That's exactly what America needs to worry about. If our government is only going to be able to spy on us but not our adversary, then it makes sense that they'll be shooting their missiles at us instead of our adversaries. We'll have no defense, unlike ISIS. We The People need to keep up with ISIS and make sure that we are at least as hard to spy on, as they are.
So I think that means we need to get our computers and software from overseas. And if that means US economy shifts from tech jobs to McDonalds jobs
"US" != "America" (Score:1)
Re:"US" != "America" (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, but no other country in the Americas goes by "America". You either say it is from the Americas (which is probably what they meant) or you say North or South America.
You could say that calling it the "United States" is also wrong, because Mexico is actually officially, the "United States of Mexico". The fact is that, no one from Mexico or the US really cares.
Referring to the US as "America" is pretty much accepted by everyone, including the other people living on the American continents. They don't really care if the US has used the shorthand.
And I should also note that the USA is the oldest existing independent country in the Americas, so the short hand made even more sense at the beginning.
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Yes, but no other country in the Americas goes by "America". You either say it is from the Americas (which is probably what they meant) or you say North or South America.
This is a particularly US-centric viewpoint that may be gaining some international traction by way of US cultural pressure, but it still has a long way to go to become the norm outside of the US itself.
In Norway, "Amerika" (=America) is the name of the continent that stretches from the Antarctic to the Arctic. The use of the word "Amerikaene" (=the Americas) is basically non-existent. When we want to talk about the US specifically we mostly use "USA" with some having started to use "Amerika".
People from the
Re:"US" != "America" (Score:4, Insightful)
Referring to the US as "America" is pretty much accepted by everyone other than pedants and people with an axe to grind .
FTFY.
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Referring to the US as "America" is pretty much accepted by everyone other than pedants and people with an axe to grind .
FTFY.
And people who live in America, but not in the United States of America. It's pretty unusual for Latin Americans to use "America" to refer to the US, for example.
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Of course, calling the USA "Estados Unidos" is also ambiguous, as Mexico could also be called that.
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" They only recently (on a geologic timeframe) came into contact with each other."
And more recently we said "No touching!" and cut a trench through Panama to keep them apart.
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Yes, by stupid people, and also by smart people and people in between.
US and America both have ambiguous derivations. USA or "US American" is technically unambiguous, but people called that Miss America contestant a moron, in part, for saying "US Americans" in her famous response.
South Africa is a country in the south of Africa, but lots of countries in the southern part of Africa are not South Africa. Lesotho is actually entirely contained inside South Africa, in the South of Africa and south of much of
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Here we have someone who is NOT stupid.
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... And here come the stupid prick moderators.
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This country is called "America" by almost everyone here. Our patriotic songs call it that too, as do our politicians and journalists. We're Americans, we live in America, and you don't get to name us or our nation.
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So you are saying that California, at least that part that is west of the San Andreas Fault, is a separate continent? Different tectonic plate you know. Then there are the parts of Siberia that are on the N. American plate.
There a few definitions of continent with 4, 5, 6 and 7 continents depending on definition and being a human construction, they're all correct including the weird one that USA adopted about 60 years ago. Before that the Americans correctly considered that since North and South America are
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currently connected
Well, that's no longer true, ever since the Panama canal. We say that Europe and Asia are different continents, even though they are much better connected than North and South America. There's no reason to consider the Americas one continent. And it'
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Well if the combination of a lake, river and canal is enough to split continents, the Illinois and Michigan Canal (later replaced with the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal) split N. America into NW America and NE America way back in 1848.
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No, it's pretty much rejected by sanctimonious leftists with axes to grind.
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No, it's pretty much rejected by sanctimonious leftists with axes to grind.
And also by the sanctimonious language pedants (that others have mentioned) who've been trying to impose their bizarre syntax ideas from other languages on English, rather than the normal (Germanic) syntax that the rest of the native-speaking population uses. ;-)
Actually, the folks who follow the online linguistic forums do get a bit of fun out of mocking the latest attempts by the "peevers" (as they're generally known in such circles) to miscorrect someone else's normal English. And sometimes such thin
GP is right. (Score:2)
I understand the end of the comment perfectly in such a light. America is America's biggest problem — Read it several possible ways:
The USA is most of Spanish-speaking countries biggest problem (because it creates a drug market and requires it to be stomped over at its production/transit places; because it imposes puppet, nondemocratic governments; because it distorts local economies; a very long etc.)
The countries in our continent are the USA's biggest problem (because of migration, l
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I don't think the US intelligence or law enforcement community is going to win this one. They may try, but there's too many ways around this.
Unfortunately, it won't prevent them from trying, which could be a problem, but its going to go the way of the RSA "weaponized" encryption.
Ultimately, when faced with perfect or even really, really good encryption, your only real choice is to change tactics. It doesn't matter how good their encryption is, if you have a spy on the other end or you're able to survail t
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Encryption has been a hot topic since 1776 when Paul Revere used his lantern to pass a coded message to his fellow terrorists from a church tower. we can all decrypt this message now, likely because we are descendants of those terrorists that the message was meant for "One if by land. Two if by sea"
were we criminals? well, history is written by the victor...
Re:Confused (Score:4, Insightful)
FBI must be desperate, trying to lump people who believe in security with terrorists...
Re:Confused (Score:5, Insightful)
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Then we should definitely outlaw government snooping on people. Then they'll only snoop on bad people, which ... well, isn't that bad.
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o Making speeding against the law doesn't stop people from speeding.
o Making pickpocketing illegal doesn't stop people from pickpocketing.
o It being against the law to drink und
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The backwards, religious nutjob-laden "islamic state" IS smarter than the FBI, NSA, etc.
Not to mention the "islamic state" is actually willing to get off its ass and do its own work...
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If you outlaw good cryptography, then only outlaws will have good cryptography
Hmmm ... The usual version says "... only outlaws will have secrets". But both versions work.
(Actually, both are wrong; they should say "... only outlaws and governments will have ...". ;-)
The FBI isn't desperate at all (Score:4, Insightful)
FBI must be desperate, trying to lump people who believe in security with terrorists...
Not desperate. Just self interested and politically savvy. Accusing someone you oppose politically of being soft on or aligned with crime/terrorism is one of the oldest plays in politics. It's how we end up with absurd things like mandatory minimum and three strikes laws that do nothing to prevent crime. It's how we end up with a prison camp in Cuba, extraordinary rendition, torture, etc and the government doing nothing about it. Speak out against those things and you just feed ammo to your political enemies.
The FBI wants their job to be as easy as possible. They'll pay lip service to observing the constitution but at the end of the day they'll take making their job easier over your civil rights every time.
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Problem is, that tactic doesn't really work much anymore.
The government, especially law enforcement, has shown time and again that they are corrupt, and evil, and do NOT have the citizens best interests at heart, so the public is getting more skeptical and these lazy tactics are becomes less and less effective...
Yes it still works (Score:2)
Problem is, that tactic doesn't really work much anymore.
Like hell it doesn't. That tactic is why we have things like the Patriot Act. It's why we ended up in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's why we have this absurd and wasteful War on Drugs and the largest prison population in the world. (Hint, if our prison population is larger than China's then we are doing something wrong)
Sorry but accusations of being soft on crime are extremely effective as a political tactic. The public demonstrably falls for them each and every time and there is no evidence to the
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The people are starting to recognize it as bullshit more and more however.
The rabid nutjobs still gobble that crap up, but it's not the magic bullet it once was
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The insertion of the America in the list is the result of a successful operation by an American information warfare unit. Mission accomplished and ISIS sales guaranteed!
Re:This article is propaganda (Score:5, Funny)
Thank God! Anonymous Coward is the worst member of this site... always stirring up trouble! I'll be glad to see him go!
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Fortunately /. consists more of comments than articles and, and this is a rare thing these days, there is no comment removal going on.
In other words, any kind of propaganda posted here WILL backfire. Badly. Like this one.
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Wait! Don't go!
We're sorry. We can change I swear, just give us another chance!
Please?!?
Please stay. If not for us, do it for the children.
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