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 "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.
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".
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 ?
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.
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.
ps. You know, the guy who released this video... Is hiding in an Embassy in the UK because he is terrorised by someone who call him a terrorist, food for thought!
I see you've been downvoted.. thankfully. If you would watch that video, which I reluctantly did... because I want to make sure that I'm speaking from the right position, then you would see that in the beginning of that there were 2 men with AK-47s in the open plus one with an RPG. Notice throughout they were verifying that weapons were present. Its a terrible tragedy that any innocent people died in that sequence of events as there appears to be 2 journalists that had. But they were not TARGETED EVEN WHEN KNOWN OR THOUGHT TO BE INNOCENT. Notice that they wouldn't even take a kill shot on the injured journalist (which they had no idea he was) until they could verify that he was going to pick up a weapon! So while it is tragic, I don't see how that video proves that was are purposely targeting innocent people.
Your view is completely distorted, that's just my personal opinion and since I really don't wanna argue about it anymore (I don't see any point)... Let's agree to disagree.
As for being up/down-voted. I don't really care, I just state my views, some people like them others do not. It's what makes this community great.
I think it is pretty obvious to most people that there is a difference between actions that terrorize someone and big 'T' Terrorism. If there wasn't, any act of violence can be seen as an act of Terrorism.
So while the US/NATO armed forces (who display uniforms, have a strict command structure, are bound by international law, etc.) might be seen as an occupation/invasion force, they cannot reasonably called a Terrorist organization.
Terrorist organizations systematically target non-combatants in order to achieve their goals, do not display uniforms or have a command structure that can be entreated with. You cannot make a peace treaty with Al Qaeda for instance, you can with NATO. To act as if both groups are equivalent makes it impossible to have useful discussions about the morality of violence.
There are many people that feel like there is no moral difference between the violence perpetrated by these groups, but that doesn't mean that they can be lumped together into the same sorts of violent activities.
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. I grew up in Northern Ireland in the 70,s and 80's. The distinction between the 2 depended on which street you lived on and which street they lived on. Usually they were no more than a stones throw from one another.
Well, one axis on which we can evaluate this issue: is the group in question (a) fighting for freedom or (b) fighting to prevent women from seeing doctors or driving cars? If (b), we can comfortably assume: "not freedom fighters".
Your definition of freedom differs from theirs. They belive in the freedom to follow their religion as they belive it should be followed. Their supporters believe in the same freedom. Your definition of freedom (and indeed mine) is very different. But you would be foolish to think that they thought of themselves as the bad guys and that they had no support amongst the local populace.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
#2 I got directly from the definition of Terrorism on Wikipedia, word-for-word.
#3: "Instead, al-Qaida has started incorporating more sophisticated open-source code to help disguise its communications. 'This is as close to proof that you can get that these have changed and improved their communications structure post the Snowden leaks,' Ahlberg said."
The insinuation here is that making powerful tools available via open source is dangerous. Don't you see it?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
I used to work for a organisation that was considered "crown servants" and hence a target for the PIRA
I know maybe 7 or so people from NI and two of them are going through the truth and reconciliation process as they had close family members killed - that's a brutal%
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.
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.
But who is the enemy, and who defines them? Terrorist watch lists now contain over a million names in the US alone - are all those people plausible terrorists? Spy agencies now routinely record the communications of entire populations, domestic and foreign, and use that information for economic and political gain (why else spy on Petrobras and G20?). Terrorism seems to be the least of their preoccupations given the focus of their spying.
There is definitely a balance to be struck between a spying agency with effective oversight on their tremendous powers, pursuing only that tiny minority considered dangerous enemies who actively plan to attack (worldwide that is probably in the hundreds, or at most the thousands of people), and a spying agency which views surveilling entire populations, assassination en masse, denying travel, subverting encryption, and even spying on and lying to the politicians who oversee them as acceptable.
Unfortunately at present we find ourselves at one extreme of that continuum.
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.
To your second point, oversight is orthogonal to my original point: no matter where you land on the breadth of collections spectrum, more oversight is better. I agree with you there and in hindsight I could have done better to point that out in my original post.
Now the first point deserves a response. This demand for proof of effectiveness for various intelligence gathering techniques misses the point of my initial comment. The public doesn't know if cracking this program was a significant source of information. On the other hand, neither does Al Qaeda. Spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt among your enemies is part of role of intelligence gathering, to the point where spreading the same among the population can be acceptable.
Consider the revelation that the NSA is gathering only a relatively small sample of phone records [1]. This information came out through a leak. Why didn't the NSA rebut allegations that they were sucking up every single conversation by revealing this information? It probably wouldn't have saved them in the public eye, but it would have at least dispelled the extremely damaging public perception of the NSA as an unstoppable Big Brother-style surveillance machine that's going to murder you for the contents of your emails, as opposed to an agency that, despite their twisting the letter of the law, is still forced to operate within legal boundaries. Why didn't this report come out to try to at least correct the public's paranoia?
The answer is because doing so would have given the US's enemies guidance on how to run their operations, which would allow them to more effectively evade detection. In this context, this sort of secrecy and fear appears to be a hateful but ultimately necessary part of intelligence: you can't assuage the public without assuaging your enemies.
At the same time, the public still have to be protected from a spy agency, and this is where mandatory oversight and regulation comes into play. While Congress has vowed to implement strengthened oversight over the NSA, the public isn't satisfied because this oversight is performed in secret. I'm sort of prepared to let myself be convinced that this oversight exists, but the truth is that whatever solution is implemented is bound to be unsatisfying for exactly the reason I point out above: hateful secrecy is necessary.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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 "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.