20 ms·

"One key premise here seems to be that prior to the Snowden reporting, The Terrorists helpfully and stupidly used telephones and unencrypted emails to plot, so

"One key premise here seems to be that prior to the Snowden reporting, The Terrorists helpfully and stupidly used telephones and unencrypted emails to plot, so Western governments were able to track their plotting and disrupt at least large-scale attacks. That would come as a massive surprise to the victims of the attacks of 2002 in Bali, 2004 in Madrid, 2005 in London, 2008 in Mumbai, and April 2013 at the Boston Marathon." https://theintercept.com/2015/11/15/exploiting-emotions-about-paris-to-blame-snowden-distract-from-actual-culprits-who-empowered-isis/ https://theintercept.com/2015/11/15/exploiting-emotions-abou...

ewzimm 11y ago
It's even more absurd than that. The premise is that we can have a public worldwide debate that emphasizes how important encryption is to successfully carrying out terrorist attacks, convince the world to give up their privacy for the sake of safety, and after the majority of the protestors have been defeated by public awareness that encryption and terrorism go hand-in-hand, the terrorists will go back to using phone calls and unencrypted email.
- colund 11y ago
  If (almost) everyone who is not a terrorist were to give up encryption, then it would be much easier to track down/narrow down the terrorists if they keep using it, no?
  - mjmaher 11y ago
    I don't think so, as far as I know encrypted data doesn't really have a signature that can be easily spotted
    - marcosdumay 11y ago
      It does, it looks random (hight entropy). Yes, measured data and unmarked compressed data have this same property, as do actual random data. But is does not look like 9 nines of false positive rate are a concern to those people.
      - Dylan16807 11y ago
        You can set the entropy to any amount you want. You need to consider encryption methods that put in at least a bit of effort to hide themselves. It could select random phrases and pretend to be a spambot.
        jacquesm 11y ago
        Or it could look like the output of a Markov chain sentence generator on the topic of religion and post the messages in some well-known forum.
        marcosdumay 11y ago
        Well, where's the boundary between cryptography that hides itself and stenography? Is there one? If you include stenography, yes, it's certainly not easily recognizable. I don't think good stenography can be recognized at all, but that's not my area and I've got people contradict me at this (without further info), thus I'm not sure.
        Dylan16807 11y ago
        There's not much of a boundary, but that wasn't exactly the point I meant to make. You can do something like encode as ASCII 0s and 1s and have low entropy without that hiding anything.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    No because they're not using it in the first place. It's a totally unrelated issue, dear to some for reasons entirely their own. The fear of terrorism is just a convenient little button to press to get their cookie.
  - rbcgerard 11y ago
    Indulging this fantasy, it begs the question of whether those (enencrypted) communications would have been targeted and flagged for analysis
    - tertius 11y ago
      How does it beg the question? There is no truth being asserted in the premise causing the conclusion to be true. It's fairly clear that it was a statement from an original source, that source being trustworthy is where we would find (or not find) the information which would show the conclusion to be true, not the premise of the 'fantasy.'
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - vidarh 11y ago
        Give it up. In 30+ years of learning English, the only times I've ever seen it used in that sense has been when someone is being a pedant on forums and illustrating the now rapidly outmoded meaning of the phrase.
        dsfyu404ed 11y ago
        In 20+ years of learning English I've heard it used several times to refer to an obvious question or lack of information "$noun did $verb which resulted in $result and $result is $something interest which begs the question $question."
        conceit 11y ago
        well, your confusion of tenses kinda colors your knowledge about grammar rather questionable and i say that as a foreign speaker
        tertius 11y ago
        Until it changes meaning, I cannot give it up. A curse I tell you!
  - munificent 11y ago
    Maybe, but I'd rather not send my financial information over the Internet in cleartext every time I buy something from a web site.
    - serge2k 11y ago
      You wouldn't. The government would just have the private keys so they could decrypt traffic easily.
      - jedmeyers 11y ago
        Kind of like the TSA approved locks for your baggage. Those are very secure and can be opened only by the government officials, last I heard. The only downside is that those TSA master keys might become available to the third party somehow, but I don't see that happening anytime soon, since we can always trust the government to keep such information secure.
        vilts 11y ago
        Not "might become available", they already are - https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel-Sentry-master-keys https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel-Sentry-master-keys Someone posted a photo of master keys and Internet was, as usual, the Internet.
        derrickdirge 11y ago
        Call me crazy, but I think that may have been the joke.
        91bananas 11y ago
        No lock is secure, ever.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - davesque 11y ago
    If there was some way to learn the identity of said terrorist simply by observing the origin and destination of an encrypted message, then perhaps. It would possible for them to coordinate and avoid this outcome. And there are still plenty of secure crypto systems out there so we wouldn't be able to decrypt their messages (unless quantum computers turn into an actual thing).
  - fineman 11y ago
    Not really, because the proposals aren't to go to no encryption but to go to government-backdoored encryption. To an observer you've still just a random stream of bits until someone tries to decrypt it with the backdoor key. Pretty easy to hide in unless we're monitoring every message. And terrorists would be smart - they'd employ non-backdoored encryption, hide that in "legit" communications, and encrypt that with the proper back-doored government encryption. They'd appear to be a totally normal snapchat user, or whatever. If we actually meant to give up all encryption, card-kiddies would destroy civilization in three weeks.
    - c22 11y ago
      And when the next Snowden publishes the global decryption keys we'll all just update our software together.
      - tripzilch 11y ago
        Surely you mean "the next Impact Team" (those behind the Ashley-Madison breaches) because Snowden actually went through painstaking lengths to not reveal stuff that would put the public at danger like that.
  - joezydeco 11y ago
    Then the terrorists would just use non-encrypted communications and blend in with the massive flow of everyday data... ...Unless you're intercepting and sniffing everything that's unencrypted. Then we're back to square one.
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  > It's even more absurd than that... after the majority of the protestors have been defeated by public awareness that encryption and terrorism go hand-in-hand, the terrorists will go back to using phone calls and unencrypted email. I think you're straw-manning their position here. The opponents of encryption aren't claiming terrorists will start using unencrypted communication, they're advocating for legally-mandated "back doors" to be built into supposedly-secure communication systems.
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    It's not a straw-men. It's not of the problems with the rationale. Terrorisms won't use legally-mandated software for they illegal operations.
  - ewzimm 11y ago
    You're right, but I didn't mean only phone calls and unencrypted email. I considered adding "or their equivalent back-doored technologies," but I hoped it would be clear. Using a compromised technology is the equivalent of unencrypted email and phone calls to whoever has the key. All it does is draw attention to how important it is to communicate in secret. This will be the Streisand effect of crypto.
    - ForHackernews 11y ago
      How would they know, though? For all we know, OpenSSL has been backdoored in some subtle way.
- digikata 11y ago
  My thought is that if we implement a back door policy, the public will have communication links which are much easier to compromise by any party, while terrorists can still easily use encryption and/or steganography to secure their communications. All the back doors accomplish in the end is harming the general public.
  - kfcpanda 11y ago
    Indeed. Also, combine your steganography argument with this image http://www.friendmosaic.com/images/example-mosaic.jpg http://www.friendmosaic.com/images/example-mosaic.jpg and it's pretty easy to see that this avenue of thought --- that we will put our efforts toward finding a way to ban encryption --- is totally ridiculous.
  - snowwrestler 11y ago
    It's not just that federally-mandated backdoors increase the chance of compromise (although they certainly do). If the U.S. government can mandate that technology companies provide access through encryption, then so can other countries. Sovereignty is still a powerful concept under international law. So imagine if Apple, upon condition of selling iPhones within China, must provide the Chinese government with a backdoor through Apple's encryption. Do you know how many federal employees use Apple technology? Including the President himself, who totes an iPad everywhere? I don't think that federal intelligence and law enforcement officials calling for backdoors have fully thought through the consequences.
    - freshhawk 11y ago
      > I don't think that federal intelligence and law enforcement officials calling for backdoors have fully thought through the consequences I think assuming that level of incompetence is a big claim. It's simply much more likely that the actual plans/goals and the talking points and press releases about the plans/goals are mostly unrelated, as usual. You can infer that those calling for backdoors have decided that calling for backdoors is the best thing to say, inferring anything more requires more information.
- hinkley 11y ago
  The State is far more efficient and effective at instilling terror than any loose organization of dissidents could ever hope to be. Read pretty much anything Amnesty International publishes, or even the right history books and you'll have all the evidence you ever need as to why privacy is important even when you think it isn't. Once bad things start happening it's too late to change your mind. They already have what they need.
BeuitTheRipTide 11y ago
It would indeed come as a massive surprise to the 2008 Mumbai terrorists, who were well versed in in using encrypted channels to communicate -- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/world/asia/09mumbai.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/world/asia/09mumbai.html?_...
- isleyaardvark 11y ago
  It was sarcasm. Encryption was used in all the listed attacks.
- JshWright 11y ago
  They were not using encrypted channels for their operational control. The security forces had no trouble listening in on the calls and text messages being sent between the attackers and their command and control infrastructure. The issue the security forces _did_ have was in identifying where the calls were originating. The actual content was not encrypted though.
protonfish 11y ago
I think I remember a terrorist attack in 2011 too.
skwirl 11y ago
I don't fully understand this line of thinking. To me, it's like saying "The belief that seat belts save lives might come as a surprise to these people who died in automobile accidents while wearing seat belts." It may indeed be that this kind of signals intelligence isn't actually helpful, but I don't think this is a very good argument either way. If there was a massive disruption of planned terrorist attacks, it is not useless just because there wasn't a complete elimination of terrorist attacks.
- gist 11y ago
  Exactly. Same reason you have locks on your doors even though they are easy to defeat. Tech types want to believe that the government is always overreaching and everything is a slippery slope to some other loss of freedom. Mixed in with a bit of overcooked paranoia thinking the government has enough time and energy to track down everyone and whatever laws they are breaking by reading their emails.
  - c22 11y ago
    If they actually did have enough time to enforce all broken laws by reading our emails then their unreasonable effectiveness may warrant the intrusion. If these capabilities only are able to thwart a small percent of lawless plots then perhaps the cost to our personal privacy and security is too high to justify.
  - dsmithatx 11y ago
    Bad analogy. The sites I help run are often receiving 10k attacks per minute with fuzzers and known exploits. The internet provides anonymity unlike some guy standing at your front door. I have yet to have an army of bad guys trying to pick my lock 10k time per minute on my house. Backdoors into things are economy is based on SSL etc. are just plain irresponsible.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
the_watcher 11y ago
This is always the part of the anti-Snowden case that baffled me. Those who seem to think that he alerted terrorists to the most secure means of communication seem to assume that, prior to the Snowden leaks, they were communicating by yelling really loudly across the NSA buildings. It's like they simply forgot about the biggest reason it took so long to find Osama bin Laden: he was so security-concerned that he used couriers and relays (which, counter to the broad narrative about the terrorist shift to security, actually cannot be decrypted)
- akshatpradhan 11y ago
  I understand what you're saying, and I agree. But I think it might be a little disingenuous to use Osama Bin Laden's crypto practices as an example. I believe this is the more interesting story of what really happened with Bin Laden? >Pakistan secretly captures Bin Laden by bribing tribesmen. The US finds out by bribing Pakistani officials. Further bribes with foreign aid money get other Pakistani officials to issue a stand down order. The SEALS swoop in unopposed but somehow still lose a helicopter. They kill a captive Bin Laden as part of a deal to avoid exposing Saudi support for Al Qaeda. The media gets fed a cover story about the compound being a command center. Some doctor guy becomes a scapegoat and vaccination programs are derailed in all of Pakistan. The CIA fabricates documents from the compound and flirts with claiming credit for "enhanced interrogation" technique in the matter. If you don't like that story then sure by all means stick with Story A: The CIA does brilliant investigative work. The commander-in-chief makes a gutsy call. The SEALs storm in and kill the bad guy in a firefight. He is buried at sea with full rituals. The 2012 presidential campaign starts a few days afterwards. If you support Story A, then this would certainly make sense: >It's like they simply forgot about the biggest reason it took so long to find Osama bin Laden: he was so security-concerned that he used couriers and relays (which, counter to the broad narrative about the terrorist shift to security, actually cannot be decrypted) ##EDIT Claims comes from a previous HN article about the Killing of Bin Laden: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9520984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9520984
  - nickbauman 11y ago
    Those are some pretty big claims, have any evidence to back them up?
cortesoft 11y ago
The terrorists also utilized roads and clean drinking water... better get rid of those, too!
imglorp 11y ago
ISIS actually tweeted in the clear before this one. Forget crypto, nobody was reading the open sources even. http://www.news.com.au/world/europe/islamic-state-tweeted-of-paris-attacks-72-hours-before-slaughter-suggesting-woman-was-involved/news-story/7a039d0fad55dad8d50f1b2df8c80979 http://www.news.com.au/world/europe/islamic-state-tweeted-of...
omginternets 11y ago
This argument misses the point IMHO: the US government was investing astronomically large sums of money in an infrastructure that was fated to quickly become less and less effective. In doing so, they were even willing to violate basic constitutional rights.

ewzimm 11y ago

It's even more absurd than that. The premise is that we can have a public worldwide debate that emphasizes how important encryption is to successfully carrying out terrorist attacks, convince the world to give up their privacy for the sake of safety, and after the majority of the protestors have been defeated by public awareness that encryption and terrorism go hand-in-hand, the terrorists will go back to using phone calls and unencrypted email.

colund 11y ago
If (almost) everyone who is not a terrorist were to give up encryption, then it would be much easier to track down/narrow down the terrorists if they keep using it, no?
- mjmaher 11y ago
  I don't think so, as far as I know encrypted data doesn't really have a signature that can be easily spotted
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    It does, it looks random (hight entropy). Yes, measured data and unmarked compressed data have this same property, as do actual random data. But is does not look like 9 nines of false positive rate are a concern to those people.
    - Dylan16807 11y ago
      You can set the entropy to any amount you want. You need to consider encryption methods that put in at least a bit of effort to hide themselves. It could select random phrases and pretend to be a spambot.
      - jacquesm 11y ago
        Or it could look like the output of a Markov chain sentence generator on the topic of religion and post the messages in some well-known forum.
      - marcosdumay 11y ago
        Well, where's the boundary between cryptography that hides itself and stenography? Is there one? If you include stenography, yes, it's certainly not easily recognizable. I don't think good stenography can be recognized at all, but that's not my area and I've got people contradict me at this (without further info), thus I'm not sure.
        Dylan16807 11y ago
        There's not much of a boundary, but that wasn't exactly the point I meant to make. You can do something like encode as ASCII 0s and 1s and have low entropy without that hiding anything.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- jacquesm 11y ago
  No because they're not using it in the first place. It's a totally unrelated issue, dear to some for reasons entirely their own. The fear of terrorism is just a convenient little button to press to get their cookie.
- rbcgerard 11y ago
  Indulging this fantasy, it begs the question of whether those (enencrypted) communications would have been targeted and flagged for analysis
  - tertius 11y ago
    How does it beg the question? There is no truth being asserted in the premise causing the conclusion to be true. It's fairly clear that it was a statement from an original source, that source being trustworthy is where we would find (or not find) the information which would show the conclusion to be true, not the premise of the 'fantasy.'
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - vidarh 11y ago
      Give it up. In 30+ years of learning English, the only times I've ever seen it used in that sense has been when someone is being a pedant on forums and illustrating the now rapidly outmoded meaning of the phrase.
      - dsfyu404ed 11y ago
        In 20+ years of learning English I've heard it used several times to refer to an obvious question or lack of information "$noun did $verb which resulted in $result and $result is $something interest which begs the question $question."
      - conceit 11y ago
        well, your confusion of tenses kinda colors your knowledge about grammar rather questionable and i say that as a foreign speaker
      - tertius 11y ago
        Until it changes meaning, I cannot give it up. A curse I tell you!
- munificent 11y ago
  Maybe, but I'd rather not send my financial information over the Internet in cleartext every time I buy something from a web site.
  - serge2k 11y ago
    You wouldn't. The government would just have the private keys so they could decrypt traffic easily.
    - jedmeyers 11y ago
      Kind of like the TSA approved locks for your baggage. Those are very secure and can be opened only by the government officials, last I heard. The only downside is that those TSA master keys might become available to the third party somehow, but I don't see that happening anytime soon, since we can always trust the government to keep such information secure.
      - vilts 11y ago
        Not "might become available", they already are - https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel-Sentry-master-keys https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel-Sentry-master-keys Someone posted a photo of master keys and Internet was, as usual, the Internet.
        derrickdirge 11y ago
        Call me crazy, but I think that may have been the joke.
      - 91bananas 11y ago
        No lock is secure, ever.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- davesque 11y ago
  If there was some way to learn the identity of said terrorist simply by observing the origin and destination of an encrypted message, then perhaps. It would possible for them to coordinate and avoid this outcome. And there are still plenty of secure crypto systems out there so we wouldn't be able to decrypt their messages (unless quantum computers turn into an actual thing).
- fineman 11y ago
  Not really, because the proposals aren't to go to no encryption but to go to government-backdoored encryption. To an observer you've still just a random stream of bits until someone tries to decrypt it with the backdoor key. Pretty easy to hide in unless we're monitoring every message. And terrorists would be smart - they'd employ non-backdoored encryption, hide that in "legit" communications, and encrypt that with the proper back-doored government encryption. They'd appear to be a totally normal snapchat user, or whatever. If we actually meant to give up all encryption, card-kiddies would destroy civilization in three weeks.
  - c22 11y ago
    And when the next Snowden publishes the global decryption keys we'll all just update our software together.
    - tripzilch 11y ago
      Surely you mean "the next Impact Team" (those behind the Ashley-Madison breaches) because Snowden actually went through painstaking lengths to not reveal stuff that would put the public at danger like that.
- joezydeco 11y ago
  Then the terrorists would just use non-encrypted communications and blend in with the massive flow of everyday data... ...Unless you're intercepting and sniffing everything that's unencrypted. Then we're back to square one.
ForHackernews 11y ago
> It's even more absurd than that... after the majority of the protestors have been defeated by public awareness that encryption and terrorism go hand-in-hand, the terrorists will go back to using phone calls and unencrypted email. I think you're straw-manning their position here. The opponents of encryption aren't claiming terrorists will start using unencrypted communication, they're advocating for legally-mandated "back doors" to be built into supposedly-secure communication systems.
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  It's not a straw-men. It's not of the problems with the rationale. Terrorisms won't use legally-mandated software for they illegal operations.
- ewzimm 11y ago
  You're right, but I didn't mean only phone calls and unencrypted email. I considered adding "or their equivalent back-doored technologies," but I hoped it would be clear. Using a compromised technology is the equivalent of unencrypted email and phone calls to whoever has the key. All it does is draw attention to how important it is to communicate in secret. This will be the Streisand effect of crypto.
  - ForHackernews 11y ago
    How would they know, though? For all we know, OpenSSL has been backdoored in some subtle way.
digikata 11y ago
My thought is that if we implement a back door policy, the public will have communication links which are much easier to compromise by any party, while terrorists can still easily use encryption and/or steganography to secure their communications. All the back doors accomplish in the end is harming the general public.
- kfcpanda 11y ago
  Indeed. Also, combine your steganography argument with this image http://www.friendmosaic.com/images/example-mosaic.jpg http://www.friendmosaic.com/images/example-mosaic.jpg and it's pretty easy to see that this avenue of thought --- that we will put our efforts toward finding a way to ban encryption --- is totally ridiculous.
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  It's not just that federally-mandated backdoors increase the chance of compromise (although they certainly do). If the U.S. government can mandate that technology companies provide access through encryption, then so can other countries. Sovereignty is still a powerful concept under international law. So imagine if Apple, upon condition of selling iPhones within China, must provide the Chinese government with a backdoor through Apple's encryption. Do you know how many federal employees use Apple technology? Including the President himself, who totes an iPad everywhere? I don't think that federal intelligence and law enforcement officials calling for backdoors have fully thought through the consequences.
  - freshhawk 11y ago
    > I don't think that federal intelligence and law enforcement officials calling for backdoors have fully thought through the consequences I think assuming that level of incompetence is a big claim. It's simply much more likely that the actual plans/goals and the talking points and press releases about the plans/goals are mostly unrelated, as usual. You can infer that those calling for backdoors have decided that calling for backdoors is the best thing to say, inferring anything more requires more information.
hinkley 11y ago
The State is far more efficient and effective at instilling terror than any loose organization of dissidents could ever hope to be. Read pretty much anything Amnesty International publishes, or even the right history books and you'll have all the evidence you ever need as to why privacy is important even when you think it isn't. Once bad things start happening it's too late to change your mind. They already have what they need.

BeuitTheRipTide 11y ago

It would indeed come as a massive surprise to the 2008 Mumbai terrorists, who were well versed in in using encrypted channels to communicate -- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/world/asia/09mumbai.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/world/asia/09mumbai.html?_...

isleyaardvark 11y ago
It was sarcasm. Encryption was used in all the listed attacks.
JshWright 11y ago
They were not using encrypted channels for their operational control. The security forces had no trouble listening in on the calls and text messages being sent between the attackers and their command and control infrastructure. The issue the security forces _did_ have was in identifying where the calls were originating. The actual content was not encrypted though.

protonfish 11y ago

I think I remember a terrorist attack in 2011 too.

skwirl 11y ago

I don't fully understand this line of thinking. To me, it's like saying "The belief that seat belts save lives might come as a surprise to these people who died in automobile accidents while wearing seat belts." It may indeed be that this kind of signals intelligence isn't actually helpful, but I don't think this is a very good argument either way. If there was a massive disruption of planned terrorist attacks, it is not useless just because there wasn't a complete elimination of terrorist attacks.

gist 11y ago
Exactly. Same reason you have locks on your doors even though they are easy to defeat. Tech types want to believe that the government is always overreaching and everything is a slippery slope to some other loss of freedom. Mixed in with a bit of overcooked paranoia thinking the government has enough time and energy to track down everyone and whatever laws they are breaking by reading their emails.
- c22 11y ago
  If they actually did have enough time to enforce all broken laws by reading our emails then their unreasonable effectiveness may warrant the intrusion. If these capabilities only are able to thwart a small percent of lawless plots then perhaps the cost to our personal privacy and security is too high to justify.
- dsmithatx 11y ago
  Bad analogy. The sites I help run are often receiving 10k attacks per minute with fuzzers and known exploits. The internet provides anonymity unlike some guy standing at your front door. I have yet to have an army of bad guys trying to pick my lock 10k time per minute on my house. Backdoors into things are economy is based on SSL etc. are just plain irresponsible.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

the_watcher 11y ago

This is always the part of the anti-Snowden case that baffled me. Those who seem to think that he alerted terrorists to the most secure means of communication seem to assume that, prior to the Snowden leaks, they were communicating by yelling really loudly across the NSA buildings. It's like they simply forgot about the biggest reason it took so long to find Osama bin Laden: he was so security-concerned that he used couriers and relays (which, counter to the broad narrative about the terrorist shift to security, actually cannot be decrypted)

akshatpradhan 11y ago
I understand what you're saying, and I agree. But I think it might be a little disingenuous to use Osama Bin Laden's crypto practices as an example. I believe this is the more interesting story of what really happened with Bin Laden? >Pakistan secretly captures Bin Laden by bribing tribesmen. The US finds out by bribing Pakistani officials. Further bribes with foreign aid money get other Pakistani officials to issue a stand down order. The SEALS swoop in unopposed but somehow still lose a helicopter. They kill a captive Bin Laden as part of a deal to avoid exposing Saudi support for Al Qaeda. The media gets fed a cover story about the compound being a command center. Some doctor guy becomes a scapegoat and vaccination programs are derailed in all of Pakistan. The CIA fabricates documents from the compound and flirts with claiming credit for "enhanced interrogation" technique in the matter. If you don't like that story then sure by all means stick with Story A: The CIA does brilliant investigative work. The commander-in-chief makes a gutsy call. The SEALs storm in and kill the bad guy in a firefight. He is buried at sea with full rituals. The 2012 presidential campaign starts a few days afterwards. If you support Story A, then this would certainly make sense: >It's like they simply forgot about the biggest reason it took so long to find Osama bin Laden: he was so security-concerned that he used couriers and relays (which, counter to the broad narrative about the terrorist shift to security, actually cannot be decrypted) ##EDIT Claims comes from a previous HN article about the Killing of Bin Laden: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9520984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9520984
- nickbauman 11y ago
  Those are some pretty big claims, have any evidence to back them up?

cortesoft 11y ago

The terrorists also utilized roads and clean drinking water... better get rid of those, too!

imglorp 11y ago

ISIS actually tweeted in the clear before this one. Forget crypto, nobody was reading the open sources even. http://www.news.com.au/world/europe/islamic-state-tweeted-of-paris-attacks-72-hours-before-slaughter-suggesting-woman-was-involved/news-story/7a039d0fad55dad8d50f1b2df8c80979 http://www.news.com.au/world/europe/islamic-state-tweeted-of...

omginternets 11y ago

This argument misses the point IMHO: the US government was investing astronomically large sums of money in an infrastructure that was fated to quickly become less and less effective. In doing so, they were even willing to violate basic constitutional rights.