7 ms·

Big Data Firm Says It Can Link Snowden Data To Changed Terrorist Behavior

34 points by santoriv 12y ago

ugk 12y ago
I don't think that's terribly difficult. The NSA has obviously changed their behavior. /snippy internet comment
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
templeos2 12y ago
God is perfectly just. You can put God on TV talking from His temple.
lectrick 12y ago
1) There is nothing that indicates that this "encryption upgrade" wasn't planned for some time. Correlation ≠ causation, and all that. 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 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.
- tptacek 12y ago
  The idea that al Qaeda might not be a terrorist group is a false controversy, as is the idea that participating in open source might be treason.
  - atmosx 12y ago
    I think it's safe to assume that a 15 year old kid in Palestine is much more terrorised at the sight of Benjamin Netanyahu than Bin Laden. 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 ?
    - bkmartin 12y ago
      Is it? Which part of Palestine? Gaza or the West Bank? I guess that maybe it is true, since Bin Laden is dead and Netanyahu is alive...you got me there... 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.
      - celticninja 12y ago
        The motivation behind the attacks don't matter, the effect on the population being attacked does. The US is/was terrorised by Al-Qaeda and afghans and Pakistanis are being terrorised by the US (e.g drone warfare). 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.
- meowface 12y ago
  Where in the world are you getting #2 and #3? 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.
  - djb_hackernews 12y ago
    Honest question, what is a terrorist group?
  - snarfy 12y ago
    Al Qaeda literally translated means 'the camp'. They would catch people proclaiming they had to 'get back to al qaeda'. There is no organization. That's just TV make believe, a label they put on any group that doesn't like western views and is a possible threat. "It must be another Al Qaeda cell." It's all nonsense.
    - walshemj 12y ago
      This is meaningless semantics a word can have more than one meaning eg "hacker" and one real word example Sinn Féin means Ourselves Alone so that means the IRA and PIRA are not Terrorist organisations?
      - snarfy 12y ago
        The point is there is not one overarching mastermind organization controlling it all, but that's what it's made out to be. They might as well call it COBRA so they can send GI Joe in to save the day. Al Qaeda. Bah. If the IRA didn't exist long before 9/11, they would have been labeled Al Qaeda too.
        meowface 12y ago
        Your interpretation is not right. Al Qaeda is not all orchestrated by one mastermind, but it is a consortium of related Islamist extremist groups. It's pretty safe to say that anyone who identifies as a member of Al Qaeda is interested in killing civilians.
- bayesianhorse 12y ago
  Terrorism in this case is pretty much the intended meaning of the word. These campaigns are launched from a position of weakness to instill fear in a stronger enemy, and especially targets civilians. 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".
Already__Taken 12y ago
It's wholesale surveillance, surely everyone has changed their behaviour by at least a little.
csbrooks 12y ago
"...for years, al-Qaida has used an encryption program written by its own coders called Mujahideen Secrets." 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.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  It's in this particular case, a great idea. And I hope this comment will strengthen those responsible in their attitude that what they build is absolutely unbreakable.
  - csbrooks 12y ago
    Sure, maybe we can talk them into using water pistols instead of real weapons, too. :)
jgrahamc 12y ago
Seems pretty tenuous to me. The 'link' seems to be 'some months after Snowden, those guys released new software with new capabilities'.
hbz 12y ago
Did Snowden reveal anything about "Mujahideen Secrets" or whether the NSA was able to unscramble communications made using that program? If it really was using homebrew cryptography, one can imagine it was already vulnerable to the types of attacks that programmers make when rolling their own security schemes.
- makomk 12y ago
  Snowden hasn't so far as I know. However, a number of security researchers have published articles analyzing Mujahideen Secrets and criticising its crypto based on publicly-available information. That probably has more to do with why they redesigned it than anything else.
youngtaff 12y ago
MRDA!
jfasi 12y ago
This provides a useful way to frame people concerns' about Snowden's revelations. 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.
- samirmenon 12y ago
  Is a sustained lack of oversight (from Congress, or anyone else) a necessary part of this compromise?
  - jfasi 12y ago
    No, and I should have address this in my initial comment. I expanded on this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8119589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8119589
- TheCondor 12y ago
  You have some points. There is a lot of missing data though. Do we know that cracking their program was significant in gathering intelligence? Do we know if they even regularly use it? 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.
jacquesm 12y ago
I think it would be much more surprising if they had not.
x1798DE 12y ago
Even assuming it's true and these leaks made it harder to catch terrorists (I would be surprised if it made a huge difference), I have to say I really don't care. Terrorism is not a very significant real risk to people living in the first world (compared to the risk of fatal lightning strike or drowning in a bathtub, for example), but pervasive mass surveillance is. 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.
- collyw 12y ago
  I took a flight back to Scotland last year. There was an anti-terrorism poster, asking to be on the look out for any of these suspicious thing: A van, a laptop, a mobile phone... It was just ridiculous every day stuff that the average person would use.
- localhost3000 12y ago
  "Terrorism is not a very significant real risk..." ...I get what you're saying but tell that to anyone who was living in or near NYC in 2001. Or anyone in or near Copley square last year. (I qualify for both...) the "More people die from [insert ridiculous thing like bee stings]!" argument doesn't work for me because there's not much you can do about bees/lightning/the existence of bathtubs but there's plenty to be done about bombs/guns/jihadists/etc. Not advocating NSA-esque tactics just reacting to the oft-used "this isn't a significant risk so why bother" argument, which I think is BS.
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    For every person that died in NYC, ~10 died in Afghanistan and ~30 died in Iraq. I suspect their families and the people around them feel much the same way. It's fortunate for both of us that they can't effectively fight back.
  - x1798DE 12y ago
    There's something you can do for all of those things. You can avoid beestings by always wearing a beekeeper's outfit. You can avoid lightning strikes by always keeping yourself grounded. You can avoid dying in a bathtub by never taking a bath. These are actually way easier deaths to prevent than stopping terrorism, where you have an active adversary who, without your intervention, will work to attack you. There's always a cost-benefit tradeoff with every risk you take. 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.
higherpurpose 12y ago
The NSA has been found to destroy the trust even US companies have, by spying on everything. As a result everyone is going to want to take their privacy more seriously, now that they know they can't trust US companies/government. 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.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  >now that they know they can't trust US companies/government Or the rest of the West for that matter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Eyes#Future_enlargement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Eyes#Future_enlargemen...
stevekinney 12y ago
Correlation does not equal causation. 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.
chrisbennet 12y ago
When a reporter finds out that the police planted evidence to get a conviction, is it the reporters fault if the criminal goes free? 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?
- Khaine 12y ago
  Snowden has leaked more then just that. Thats the fundamental difference. Most of the revelations have nothing to do with constitutional vs unconstitutional activities of the NSA, they relate to capabilities that the NSA has.
belorn 12y ago
There has been studies that linked the type of surveillance NSA do to behavior changes which decreases calls to hot-lines, doctors, lawyers, and priests. Since suicide is the second most common cause of death in adolescents, one would think that tampering with the effectiveness of suicide prevention is worse than blowing the whistle on the surveillance. 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.
- cthulhuhodor 12y ago
  link to said studies?
  - belorn 12y ago
    Sorry, meant to say a study. There are studies that look at the localized effect of surveillance (in the work place, on the street, on a park...), but I have not seen more than this study that try to look at the effect society gets from ubiquitous surveillance. link: http://www.kreativrauschen.com/blog/2008/06/04/data-retention-effectively-changes-the-behavior-of-citizens-in-germany/ http://www.kreativrauschen.com/blog/2008/06/04/data-retentio...
norlowski 12y ago
Weird fact: Snowden leaks have changed behavior of NPR reporters and content of news reports!
waterflame 12y ago
It's like accusing Google of facilitating Terrorist attacks through Maps. The NSA was unconstitutionally spying on everyone. If Snowden accused NSA without releasing any Data, no one would've believed him.
Rapzid 12y ago
If they can link it, why haven't they? Everything is linked by the passage of time..
hoggle 12y ago
People who don't want to get caught doing something change their communication behaviour all the time. If anybody is interested in that kind of stuff I'd recommend watching the surprisingly good TV show "The Wire". 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)
smoothgrips 12y ago
This is a great example of the "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" logical fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc
slashCJ 12y ago
I wonder if this is the same sophisticated open source encryption recommended by NIST which was revealed the NSA influenced policy in?...
opendais 12y ago
Correlation ≠ causation "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.
abhv 12y ago
The actual report is now linked here: https://www.recordedfuture.com/al-qaeda-encryption-technology-part-2/ 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.

34 points by santoriv 12y ago

ugk 12y ago

I don't think that's terribly difficult. The NSA has obviously changed their behavior. /snippy internet comment

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

templeos2 12y ago

God is perfectly just. You can put God on TV talking from His temple.

lectrick 12y ago

1) There is nothing that indicates that this "encryption upgrade" wasn't planned for some time. Correlation ≠ causation, and all that. 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 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.

tptacek 12y ago
The idea that al Qaeda might not be a terrorist group is a false controversy, as is the idea that participating in open source might be treason.
- atmosx 12y ago
  I think it's safe to assume that a 15 year old kid in Palestine is much more terrorised at the sight of Benjamin Netanyahu than Bin Laden. 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 ?
  - bkmartin 12y ago
    Is it? Which part of Palestine? Gaza or the West Bank? I guess that maybe it is true, since Bin Laden is dead and Netanyahu is alive...you got me there... 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.
    - celticninja 12y ago
      The motivation behind the attacks don't matter, the effect on the population being attacked does. The US is/was terrorised by Al-Qaeda and afghans and Pakistanis are being terrorised by the US (e.g drone warfare). 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.
meowface 12y ago
Where in the world are you getting #2 and #3? 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.
- djb_hackernews 12y ago
  Honest question, what is a terrorist group?
- snarfy 12y ago
  Al Qaeda literally translated means 'the camp'. They would catch people proclaiming they had to 'get back to al qaeda'. There is no organization. That's just TV make believe, a label they put on any group that doesn't like western views and is a possible threat. "It must be another Al Qaeda cell." It's all nonsense.
  - walshemj 12y ago
    This is meaningless semantics a word can have more than one meaning eg "hacker" and one real word example Sinn Féin means Ourselves Alone so that means the IRA and PIRA are not Terrorist organisations?
    - snarfy 12y ago
      The point is there is not one overarching mastermind organization controlling it all, but that's what it's made out to be. They might as well call it COBRA so they can send GI Joe in to save the day. Al Qaeda. Bah. If the IRA didn't exist long before 9/11, they would have been labeled Al Qaeda too.
      - meowface 12y ago
        Your interpretation is not right. Al Qaeda is not all orchestrated by one mastermind, but it is a consortium of related Islamist extremist groups. It's pretty safe to say that anyone who identifies as a member of Al Qaeda is interested in killing civilians.
bayesianhorse 12y ago
Terrorism in this case is pretty much the intended meaning of the word. These campaigns are launched from a position of weakness to instill fear in a stronger enemy, and especially targets civilians. 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".

Already__Taken 12y ago

It's wholesale surveillance, surely everyone has changed their behaviour by at least a little.

csbrooks 12y ago

"...for years, al-Qaida has used an encryption program written by its own coders called Mujahideen Secrets." 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.

jacquesm 12y ago
It's in this particular case, a great idea. And I hope this comment will strengthen those responsible in their attitude that what they build is absolutely unbreakable.
- csbrooks 12y ago
  Sure, maybe we can talk them into using water pistols instead of real weapons, too. :)

jgrahamc 12y ago

Seems pretty tenuous to me. The 'link' seems to be 'some months after Snowden, those guys released new software with new capabilities'.

hbz 12y ago

Did Snowden reveal anything about "Mujahideen Secrets" or whether the NSA was able to unscramble communications made using that program? If it really was using homebrew cryptography, one can imagine it was already vulnerable to the types of attacks that programmers make when rolling their own security schemes.

makomk 12y ago
Snowden hasn't so far as I know. However, a number of security researchers have published articles analyzing Mujahideen Secrets and criticising its crypto based on publicly-available information. That probably has more to do with why they redesigned it than anything else.

youngtaff 12y ago

MRDA!

jfasi 12y ago

This provides a useful way to frame people concerns' about Snowden's revelations. 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.

samirmenon 12y ago
Is a sustained lack of oversight (from Congress, or anyone else) a necessary part of this compromise?
- jfasi 12y ago
  No, and I should have address this in my initial comment. I expanded on this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8119589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8119589
TheCondor 12y ago
You have some points. There is a lot of missing data though. Do we know that cracking their program was significant in gathering intelligence? Do we know if they even regularly use it? 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.

jacquesm 12y ago

I think it would be much more surprising if they had not.

x1798DE 12y ago

Even assuming it's true and these leaks made it harder to catch terrorists (I would be surprised if it made a huge difference), I have to say I really don't care. Terrorism is not a very significant real risk to people living in the first world (compared to the risk of fatal lightning strike or drowning in a bathtub, for example), but pervasive mass surveillance is. 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.

collyw 12y ago
I took a flight back to Scotland last year. There was an anti-terrorism poster, asking to be on the look out for any of these suspicious thing: A van, a laptop, a mobile phone... It was just ridiculous every day stuff that the average person would use.
localhost3000 12y ago
"Terrorism is not a very significant real risk..." ...I get what you're saying but tell that to anyone who was living in or near NYC in 2001. Or anyone in or near Copley square last year. (I qualify for both...) the "More people die from [insert ridiculous thing like bee stings]!" argument doesn't work for me because there's not much you can do about bees/lightning/the existence of bathtubs but there's plenty to be done about bombs/guns/jihadists/etc. Not advocating NSA-esque tactics just reacting to the oft-used "this isn't a significant risk so why bother" argument, which I think is BS.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  For every person that died in NYC, ~10 died in Afghanistan and ~30 died in Iraq. I suspect their families and the people around them feel much the same way. It's fortunate for both of us that they can't effectively fight back.
- x1798DE 12y ago
  There's something you can do for all of those things. You can avoid beestings by always wearing a beekeeper's outfit. You can avoid lightning strikes by always keeping yourself grounded. You can avoid dying in a bathtub by never taking a bath. These are actually way easier deaths to prevent than stopping terrorism, where you have an active adversary who, without your intervention, will work to attack you. There's always a cost-benefit tradeoff with every risk you take. 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.

higherpurpose 12y ago

The NSA has been found to destroy the trust even US companies have, by spying on everything. As a result everyone is going to want to take their privacy more seriously, now that they know they can't trust US companies/government. 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.

happyscrappy 12y ago
>now that they know they can't trust US companies/government Or the rest of the West for that matter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Eyes#Future_enlargement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Eyes#Future_enlargemen...

stevekinney 12y ago

Correlation does not equal causation. 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.

chrisbennet 12y ago

When a reporter finds out that the police planted evidence to get a conviction, is it the reporters fault if the criminal goes free? 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?

Khaine 12y ago
Snowden has leaked more then just that. Thats the fundamental difference. Most of the revelations have nothing to do with constitutional vs unconstitutional activities of the NSA, they relate to capabilities that the NSA has.

belorn 12y ago

There has been studies that linked the type of surveillance NSA do to behavior changes which decreases calls to hot-lines, doctors, lawyers, and priests. Since suicide is the second most common cause of death in adolescents, one would think that tampering with the effectiveness of suicide prevention is worse than blowing the whistle on the surveillance. 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.

cthulhuhodor 12y ago
link to said studies?
- belorn 12y ago
  Sorry, meant to say a study. There are studies that look at the localized effect of surveillance (in the work place, on the street, on a park...), but I have not seen more than this study that try to look at the effect society gets from ubiquitous surveillance. link: http://www.kreativrauschen.com/blog/2008/06/04/data-retention-effectively-changes-the-behavior-of-citizens-in-germany/ http://www.kreativrauschen.com/blog/2008/06/04/data-retentio...

norlowski 12y ago

Weird fact: Snowden leaks have changed behavior of NPR reporters and content of news reports!

waterflame 12y ago

It's like accusing Google of facilitating Terrorist attacks through Maps. The NSA was unconstitutionally spying on everyone. If Snowden accused NSA without releasing any Data, no one would've believed him.

Rapzid 12y ago

If they can link it, why haven't they? Everything is linked by the passage of time..

hoggle 12y ago

People who don't want to get caught doing something change their communication behaviour all the time. If anybody is interested in that kind of stuff I'd recommend watching the surprisingly good TV show "The Wire". 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)

smoothgrips 12y ago

This is a great example of the "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" logical fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc

slashCJ 12y ago

I wonder if this is the same sophisticated open source encryption recommended by NIST which was revealed the NSA influenced policy in?...

opendais 12y ago

Correlation ≠ causation "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.

abhv 12y ago

The actual report is now linked here: https://www.recordedfuture.com/al-qaeda-encryption-technology-part-2/ 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.