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Crime Encryption Politics

Breaking the Codes In Oslo Terrorist's Manifesto 231

repvik writes "The 1500-page manifesto of the terrorist who killed 77 people in Oslo and on Utøya two weeks ago contains a series of seemingly encrypted URLs. There are 46 of them, and the initial part of the URLs appear to be GPS coordinates. An effort to analyze the codes have been launched."
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Breaking the Codes In Oslo Terrorist's Manifesto

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  • inevitably (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 06, 2011 @10:22PM (#37012016)

    they all lead to goatse

  • The 1500 page manifest of terrorist

    Wow, that must be a lot of terrorists if it takes a 1500 page manifest to list them all!

    • ... and remember, that's just Manifest O. There's 25 other letters in the alphabet.
      • Actually, there are 29 letters [wikipedia.org] in the Norwegian alphabet - therefore there are 28 more manifestos to concern ourselves with.
        • by PCM2 ( 4486 )

          Ah, but the manifest[o] was entirely in English. (Interestingly enough, I thought.)

          • by arth1 ( 260657 )

            For generous values of "entirely".. There are a couple of "Norwegianisms", and, of course, the last two letters of the URLs we discuss here are in Cyrillic (Serbian variety).
            From what I can guess, these two letters denote a number, in a variety of the Cyrillic number system.

          • by Rei ( 128717 )

            Meh, everyone speaks English nowadays; it's the universal language for international communication. It's actually kind of frustrating when you're trying to learn someone else's language. I was in Iceland recently, and whenever I opened my mouth to practice my Icelandic, as soon as they heard my poor beginner Icelandic, they automatically switched to English. Thus preventing me from actually getting any better at the language through practice with them. :P Essentially everyone there between ages 14 and 7

  • by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Saturday August 06, 2011 @10:59PM (#37012124) Journal

    My guess is that when he entered strings like this into his wordprocessor
    52.068.4.309plusf24:KWimfhh436383717863

    That it interpreted the numbers as IPv4 addresses and prepended http:/// [http] onto it. If someone can verify then that part of the "mystery" is solved. It has nothing to do with URLs.

    • by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Saturday August 06, 2011 @11:05PM (#37012152) Homepage

      Good theory, so I just checked in Word. It will automatically hyperlink a DNS-looking URL, but it will not automatically hyperlink a numeric address. Also, although you don't need to type the http:/// [http] Word just applies the correct hyperlink as a style; it does not add the http:/// [http] to the text you typed.

    • by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      And another factor is that the geographic locations listed in the manifesto may just be approximate, or just pointing to a keyword that points to the real target or information source.

      But it's interesting that the position in Gothenburg, Sweden points to a block containing a movie theater and the location in Vienna isn't far from the Scientologists there.

      And it can also be meeting locations agreed upon for different potential contacts or mailbox drops.

      Or it's just a few random locations to threw the investi

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 ) on Sunday August 07, 2011 @05:28AM (#37013120) Homepage

        More likely the code, just like the rest of the manifesto, are all just elements to feed the ego of a psychopath whose singular motivation was to ease his frustrations by inflicting pain and suffering upon as many people as possible. Everything now is about ego inflation of a homicidal maniac, about gaining further attention, about driving conspiracy theories and about forcing his frustrations upon others.

        The more it drifts from reality, the reality of a sad pathetic individual suffering from a genetic birth defect that absented him from interacting normally, basically lost in a empty world devoid empathy, conscience and a whole range of human emotions, including happiness and joy. His world of frustration, driven largely by the envy of seeing normal people sharing real emotions whilst he could only ape them so that he could appear normal and gain advantage in what ever self serving schemes and plots he had going to assuage his frustrations and feed his ego.

        His greatest fear, to be treated as a pathetic nothing, a victim of a genetic birth defect whose manifesto is as meaningless and empty as his life was. The manifesto being nothing but fantasy and lies to feed his ego and make him the centre of attention. The is only one lesson to be drawn from his life, the importance of testing for psychopathy in order to prevent the huge of of victims those that suffer this genetic disorder create. Those that go insane with a gun have nothing on those that gain positions in government or those that run corporations.

  • by Nyder ( 754090 ) on Saturday August 06, 2011 @11:01PM (#37012134) Journal

    Here's the problem:

    If i had a grudge against humans, or a certain set of humans, or something really stupid like that and I wanted to do something that will get me remembered, for whatever reason, in the history of man, I'd do some crap just like this. Make up a "manifesto" of probably gibberish, encyrpted and whatnot, so peeps would spend many hours of discussion and get me remembered.

    So do we think we'll get a better understanding of the dude who killed those people by figuring out his stupid manifesto? And that will help his victims how exactly? I mean, i'm sure their families are probably helping figure this manifesto out and twitting it to all their friends. (yes, i'm being fucking sarcastic here).

    Crazy people are, well, crazy. It doesn't matter their reason for doing stuff like killing people. That shit ain't cool, and shouldn't be going on, no matter the reason. But very little we will do, will stop the crazies from doing the crazy shit.

    Sometimes there are signs, and sometime we recognize crazy before crazy gets killing. But most the time, we don't. We don't realize that crazy is just under the skin of that person we talk shit to all the time. We don't realize that everyone has crazy in them, and sometimes, the littlest things set crazy off.

    Of course, i could be wrong. This murder might have the answer to life, the universe and everything in his manifesto. And even if it did, it's not worth our time trying to find out. Dude went out and killed a bunch of people to get attention for his manifesto and here people are, giving it attention.

    what dude did worked, and your showing that to every wanna be "terrorist" with a grudge against something and a chip on their shoulder, that if you want attention, kill some peeps and you'll get it.

    • +1.
      we should not give the manifesto of a failure of humanity the time of day.
      this is obvious.
      w/r/t the folks trying to decode locations and messages in the document, i can only presume that they're acting with the idea that perhaps Nutzo has accomplices or has already planted bombs in those locations or etc, and are working to prevent further killing. if there's evidence in that direction, then great. but if not then it seems like maybe another case of us technically-minded folks getting obsessed with solvi

      • by jamesh ( 87723 )

        we should not give the manifesto of a failure of humanity the time of day.

        IMHO, such a document could give an insight into what went wrong here. Was the guy just crazy? Did something happen in his life that made him this way or was he going to go off the rails no matter what? Was he brainwashed by some cult? What, if anything, could have been done differently to make sure this can't happen again? I'm guessing the answer may well turn out to be "we just don't know", but I think think it deserves some analysis, in the same way that the writings of various other nutjobs from history

        • ban it ?
          of course not. that's both impossible and counterproductive, as you say.

          you make a valid point that it's valuable to understand what went wrong with the killer.
          i feel that the decoding effort at hand isn't really interested in that.

          • by jamesh ( 87723 )

            you make a valid point that it's valuable to understand what went wrong with the killer.

            i feel that the decoding effort at hand isn't really interested in that.

            Probably not. A puzzle is neither good or bad, it's just a puzzle, and a puzzle exists to be solved :)

            • A PROBLEM is there to be solved.
              A puzzle is there to confuse and distract.

              Sometimes, puzzles are good training for problem solving, more often than not they are simply a time-killing device.

        • Having read thru parts of it, I could certainly understand the polices motives if they tried to ban it. Its a terrorism manual, and some of its a little more sophisticated than the spazzy "how to blow up bins at highschool" pap you used to see on the bbs .txt collections.

          Its actually a fairly horrifying document, the guy has some seriously evil mental wiring. He's not planning just a war on muslims, he's rooting for the whole nuclear holocaust scenario, discusses in details things like anthrax attacks and u

    • by kent_eh ( 543303 )

      If i had a grudge against humans, or a certain set of humans, or something really stupid like that and I wanted to do something that will get me remembered, for whatever reason, in the history of man, I'd do some crap just like this. Make up a "manifesto" of probably gibberish, encyrpted and whatnot, so peeps would spend many hours of discussion and get me remembered.

      That's sort of what Dexter [imdb.com] did, though his motivation was to mess with the investigators.
      Then again, Dexter is a fictional character...

      This guy probably is deluded enough to believe he was doing the world a favour, and that the world would see his writings as a sensible "way forward" now that he has set the ball in motion.
      I'm sure it's perfectly sensible in his mind, if only everyone else would just listen to him.

      ----

      I have had to deal with a family member who was eventually hospitalized with Delus

      • by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        I did notice that at many of the locations there have been a gym not far from the location.

        And he has been exercising heavily in prison, so maybe those are locations of preferred gyms.

    • Know your enemy (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 07, 2011 @03:01AM (#37012746)

      I've read some of his book. I won't finish it (not enough time in my life), but it's worth reading at least the first couple chapters and skimming the rest. It's scary to do because you'll find that it's not "incoherent ramblings" as the media tells you - quite a bit of it is eloquently written (I suspect it's stitched together from multiple sources) and presents some decent arguments. I'm pretty far to the socialist side, and he's hard-right, but I agree with some of what he's saying, even if I think the conclusion that he reaches (that it's time for Europe to rise up against the oppression of the current ideological regime) is bunk.

      This tragedy isn't caused by simple Crazy. An important ingredient is Ideology. To prevent future killings in this form - lone wolf, keeping a low profile - you have to fight the ideological reasons that drive them to do such a thing.

      The amount of Crazy this takes is not Batshit Insane. It's a lack of critical thinking about the flaws in their ideology, the conclusions they've reached, and the worth of the actions they will undertake; nurtured a supportive environment which will encourage his thoughts; but still enough sanity for long-term planning and preparation without raising red flags.

      Police work does not find these types. Some idiots will fuck up and get caught, but there are lots of people out there who are lacking in the critical thinking department. Some will always slip through.

      The way you defend against this is not to brush him off as Crazy; but rather to dive into his mind and try to understand what drove him to kill 77 people. And once you do, you, a rational thinker, need to talk with other people who may hold radical ideologies and help them to understand where the flaws in their beliefs are before the real Crazy takes hold and they start shooting.

      And you can't until you let yourself really understand his ideas, rather than just getting the two sentence blurbs. Know - deeply, intellectually - your enemy.

      • The Unabomber(The American terrorist most similar to this nutjob) also had a very eloquent manifesto. Doesn'tt change that he was just as fucking crazy.

      • I 100% agree with what you say. And I've seen very few people sharing that view.

        This is not some nutcase going batshit crazy, this is a *relatively* sane person following a (weird / ) set of logic to conclude it's the only rational thing to do.

        The right thing to do is understand why he came to that conclusion, analyze where he decided that that was the only thing he could do, and then find out how to prevent that from happening in the future.

        Of course, when I try to explain that concept to people (1. he's n

        • One thing I do not understand about this guy, however, is why he didn't predict the backlash his actions have given. In scandinavia at least, there are a lot of eyes on the right wing, both extremist and otherwise. The political party that he attacked has had a huge surge in popularity. He must have known that his actions would not be approved by the public, so why didn't he see this?

    • [If] I wanted to do something that will get me remembered, for whatever reason, in the history of man, I'd do some crap just like this. Make up a "manifesto" of probably gibberish, encyrpted and whatnot, so peeps would spend many hours of discussion and get me remembered.

      It's a fair time ago, but IIRC some rabble-rouser took time off from fitting kitchens to try that. And then a few hundred years later some camel-riding bandit did a similar thing. People are still arguing about what they meant, and whethe

    • Be very very careful with thinking this guys was 'crazy' or a 'loon' or 'insane'...

      He was anything but. He was very convinced about being right, highly intelligent, well read, and well versed.

      Dismissing him as a 'crazy person' is extremely dangerous, since that will never allow you to actually find out why he did this.

      There are a lot of people that have the same ideas he has, a lot of them even publicly. The fact he decided to take violent action based on that idea is something to reflect on, not something

    • by drolli ( 522659 )

      Yes. Its funny.

      This guy everthing he wanted. Cameras, and millions of people wondering about his paranoid bullshit - and some people even believing they must make a live blog on what their "analysis" of this shit is. Believe me, this thing is, including all possible codes, sorted out right now by professionals, without any additional attention.

    • by Yvanhoe ( 564877 ) on Sunday August 07, 2011 @08:30AM (#37013704) Journal
      You can't fight the ideology without understanding it. Reading Mein Kampf would have saved European politicians a lot of hesitation before they declared war on Germany.

      The most serious error we can make is to dismiss this guy as a nut. He was not, he was a smart man who gave into a toxic ideology. I mean, he learned how to manage dangerous chemical processes in a DIY fashion, he carefully planned a lot of dangerous material acquisition, he has a coherent prose, and sadly, he made a very smart choice in the people he chose to kill.

      Understanding why he chose to follow the most extreme opponents of multiculturalism is important. Right now, some people are reading his prose like a manual. We know about the streisand effect : trying to force people to not talk about something doesn't work. Right now, every sympathizer of far right ideology has read it. Understand the effect it will have, understand what to expect.

      After reading it, I was convinced that it will encourage other people to act in a similar way. It is very seducing for people with the right background. Fight it by addressing the questions it poses about multiculturalism. His arguments need to be addressed and answered instead of being silenced.
  • From the link:
    > Send an email to manifest-analysis-request@analysis.no.net with the word "subscribe" in the body text (not subject) to participate.

    I guess the good ol' Majordomo is being revived. Can't wait to see if they also setup a webring or at least put up a guestbook that I could sign!

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday August 06, 2011 @11:22PM (#37012206)

    B.E.S.U.R.E.T.O.D.R.I.N.K.Y.O.U.R.O.V.A.L.T.I.N.E.

    and, to accommodate Slashdot's filters...

    b.e.s.u.r.e.t.o.d.r.i.n.k.y.o.u.r.o.v.a.l.t.i.n.e.

  • by Lanteran ( 1883836 ) on Saturday August 06, 2011 @11:29PM (#37012224) Homepage Journal

    I'll wait for the movie.
    Too soon?

  • Looks like it's Oystein, (a.k.a. edison) in charge of the operation. He's one sharp cookie and has been in the Norweigan scene for decades. I remember how fun we he was 20 yrs ago. xD I'm sure it will be solved soon.

    • by xnpu ( 963139 )

      Not that sharp. Anyone who can use Google will find that "Ducky" comes with some Adobe file format, not some mysterious company editing these pictures.

  • Lost time (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mseeger ( 40923 ) on Sunday August 07, 2011 @12:54AM (#37012466)

    I am sure that this will be lost time. Worse. Spending time with his manifesto is exactly the thing, the killer wants us to do. He is not worth the time and effort, his manifesto is also not worth it.

    The murders were his PR campaign. Don't fall for it. I know that a "damnation memoriae" will not work, but don't help a killer with additional attention.

    I don't want to know about his childhood, i am not interested in his home stories, i don't want to see his pictures or see his manifesto publicly discussed.

    If you want to spend time, do it for his victims. What where their dreams, ideas, visions? Try to use your words to keep their memory alive, not some sick bastards.

    Yours, Martin

    • Re:Lost time (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 07, 2011 @01:48AM (#37012576)
      You can't uproot ideas, even very silly and mad, by just ignoring them, and supression is actually the breeding ground for them. Maybe it's boring to refute every one of them indefinitely, when you can spend that time watching Glee or chewing food, but this kind of education by discussion is, in my humble opinion, much, much better than 76 persons dead in one day. It seems like his killing spree was not the aim but due to negligence of society to discuss some (yes, dubious) political ideas. You see? Once you supressing the question, you can get things going ballistic.
      • by mseeger ( 40923 )

        As i said, i don't want a "damnatio memoriae", because it wouldn't work. I want his ideas and himself to be snubbed. Even the worst paper is to valuable to print his face upon. You can report on him without having to plaster his face in the front page, mentioning his name or quoting his manifesto. And i can promise you one thing: This would be hurting him a thousand times more than any trashing prison guards could give him. I want him to die of old age in prison, realizing nobody cares a damn about him.

        If

    • by arth1 ( 260657 )

      I am sure that this will be lost time. Worse. Spending time with his manifesto is exactly the thing, the killer wants us to do.

      He wants us to read the manifesto and be swayed by his supreme understanding of how Europe and Norway are going to hell in a handbasket unless we turn Xenophobic.
      He doesn't want us to read the manifesto to understand how a person could crack so completely in order to prevent it from ever happening again.

      The evil deed can never be undone. The best that can be done for the victims is a resounding "never again", and become a society where no one can become this crazy and discuss their conspiracy theories on s

      • by mseeger ( 40923 )

        He doesn't want us swayed by his supreme understanding. He wants attention and currently he is getting it :-(.

    • by deblau ( 68023 )

      My /. fortune with this article: "Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy."

    • If you want to spend time, do it for his victims. What where their dreams, ideas, visions? Try to use your words to keep their memory alive, not some sick bastards.

      Well said.

  • Some excerpts from this nauseating, yet derivative, "manifesto":

    Time is of the essence. We have only a few decades to consolidate a sufficient level of resistance before our major cities are completely demographically overwhelmed by Muslims. Ensuring the successful distribution of this compendium to as many Europeans as humanly possible will significantly contribute to our success. It may be the only way to avoid our present and future dhimmitude (enslavement) under Islamic majority rule in our own countrie

    • Daily Mail readers have already been getting the manifesto in serialized form for over a hundred years. Were house prices and vaccinations discussed at all in the manifesto?
    • by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Sunday August 07, 2011 @08:03AM (#37013612)

      nauseating

      The really nauseating thing is that he is, of course, exactly right about some of what's in there. That the truth is mixed up in crazy land is part of the problem with guys like this - because when they're calibrating their world view, even their irrational minds can find some confirmation of their suspicions/projections, and it happens just often enough to keep them going on the loonier stuff.

    • by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      I don't think he had a too clear idea of actual crime levels in western europe from ww2 to today nor does he seem to have any clue about the decade before fifties(or much about anything before or after that). It's pretty apparent that he didn't, for a terrorist it's kind of strange that he in that way doesn't seem to be too familiar with political groups in europe which used terror a lot from fifties to nineties. the rhetoric is just your usual lies of old people that go "young whippersnappers these days ar

  • It took 0 seconds to realize ip-numbers were out of the question and another 2 seconds to realize it could be coordinates and 5 more to see they map to urban areas.

    But ask geocachers to take a look at it. They're quite good with coordinates and obfuscating them.
    Since some of the locations are in the middle of the street, it would make sense that the coordinate also needs to be translated.
    The Cyrillic for instance could contain information for this translation. Try adding the 0x402-0x428 to the coordinates.

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