I know right? I just started reading Homicide by David Simon and between that and this article I can really see the potential for a Wire/Generation Kill sort of TV series. Will never happen though.
@Nelsie When a warlord wants to conduct sensitive communications he connects to the internet via a runner who travels to the next village and uses a phone to dictate to a typist who (ok bear with me here) is using shitty broken encryption software that he knows is going to get a bomb dropped on him, but he doesnât have a choice because it was written by the warlordâs nephew, and the warlord trusts his nephew, heâs very bright and knows all about this internet business.
I was using âemailâ as a shorthand for âcommand, communications and control networkâ. It doesnât matter how much is actual email and how much is runners with sticks, what matters is whether it can be tracked back to his physical location; if his cousinâs nephew gets a concrete bomb dropped on him, the competent terrorist will route around the damage â because, like bin Laden, like Kim Jong-un, he was educated to a Western standard; indeed by now he will have probably grown up with the internet. These people are not ignorant tribespeople; they are as smart and educated as you or me.
Itâs not just some big camel, where you just dump everything onâŚ
@Nelsie Nonono, I agree with all of that. All I meant to say (before my imagination ran away with me) is that the warlord himself isnât overly exposed to cryptographic flaws because, as we saw with bin Laden, anyone who is a serious player just stays the fuck away from anything with a signal. As you say. But software with names like âjihadi secretsâ do exist, and you do have to wonder if maybe the people who are enforcing its use arenât the ones who actually use it, given how fantastically dumb an idea it seems.
The digital equivalent of carrying all your loot around in a big bag marked âlootâ.
I am not one of those you mention, but my son was sitting outside one of the restaurants that got machine-gunned just a week earlier. Imagining what I would have thought, the very last thing I would want is Cameron and his cronies setting up a two billion pound a year software project to spy on us, with no written aims and no measurable deliverables; awarding it to their friends; getting us to pay for it; and saying it was their memorial.
Yeah, youâre right. I probably meant something like the averagely bad result rather than the worst.
But put the dead terrorists with poor OPSEC in one pile and the dead CEOs with poor OPSEC in another, and youâre just looking at one pile, Iâd imagine. And CEOs with poor OPSEC can always blame someone else, then claim a larger pay rise for doing so, in the charming way of CEOs everywhere.
Really interesting reply and the fact that Snowden has had little effect on the extremists internet behaviour is something I hadnât known so the 'snoopers could have little effect even if it were implemented. Youâre right about the risk of action against people with the âwrongâ name or ethnicity. Iâm sure that there are many moderate Muslims whose voices have been silenced out of fear since these attacks and those are voices which we all, particularly now, need to hear.
Thanks for the reply and Iâm glad that your son is still alive and well and with you. I have a son who is just in his second year of university and I know how vulnerable having children makes you, forever hoping that theyâre not in the wrong place at the wrong time. I didnât vote for Cameron like so many of us and for the moment weâre stuck with him and his âcroniesâ. Your post has inspired me to look into the facts about the âsnoopers charterâ more closely, which has got to be a good thing but the problem is that I am âblinded by the scienceâ, by how powerful the internet is, and confused by the technology. I donât know who truly informed we (meaning the general public and not specialists) can be on this issue, and that in itself worries me.
It is not easy to grasp the details of what is and what is not possible in computers, and computer surveillance. The really cunning stuff is, well, really cunning and hard to explain, and I donât get most of it.
Let me illustrate: imagine planning some terrorist act. You could put what you are going to do in plain text in an e-mail to you other plotters. A program that looks for keywords would pick out that e-mail, more advanced programs might parse it to check this is not a fragment from an already known text on terrorism, but an actual plan, and you are on their radar. So, instead of sending plain text, you hand-write the message, photograph it, and send it as a picture. You donât need a deep understanding of what is possible to grasp that a picture is a lot harder to read than plain text. if you want to get a bit fancy, you could stick your message in the blue channel of another image - it might look a bit weird but view just the blue channel and it will be obvious.
That suggestion is hopelessly crude. No one would use it - not because it would not work, but because there are lots of better ways. So, you can perhaps see how hard it might be to actually search every e-mail.
Also consider the efforts the US put into providing encrypted communications to people around the world living under ârepressive regimesâ (most notably, IIRC, to Chinese dissidents attempting to communicate through the Great Firewall), and now contrast that with American elected officials govât asshats calling for removing encryption or requiring a software backdoor (e.g. âClipper chipâ).
Oh? I was unaware of this. How great of you to mention that particular fact.
User @Richard_Kirk wrote two posts that I agreed with, and that user noted that his particular offspring was in the specific area that was attacked, just prior to it being attacked. In that the user appears to share some similarities in thought with me, I lapsed into a social nicety of which you appear to be unaware. Let me use a small image file to illustrate my comment:
Nope to the nopeâitâs the fucktard governors and GOP POTUS candidates, and really politicians that I consider xenophobic, bigoted, douchebags who are leaping over one another to use the violence in Paris as a tool to further their own campaigns, as well as to institute poorly considered policies, like this idiotic âSnooperâs Charterâ.
And beyond thatâŚI really really really love that gif rolling g with lemon zest.
