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On Monday at the Center for Strategic & International Studies' Global Security Forum, John Brennan, Director of the US' Central Intelligence Agency, spoke about the recent bombings in Paris. In what many commentators took as a reference to Edward Snowden, but could instead refer to the Church Committee, Brennan predicted that finding the attackers will be more difficult than it would have been, had intelligence services been left unchecked:
In the past several years, because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government's role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that are taken that make our ability collectively, internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging.
I do hope that this is going to be a wake-up call particularly in areas of Europe where I think there has been a misrepresentation of what the intelligence security services are doing by some quarters that are designed to undercut those capabilities.
[...]
There are a lot of technological capabilities that are available right now that make it exceptionally difficult both technically as well as legally for intelligence security services to have insight that they need to uncover it.
Brennan's complete remarks are available in video via C-SPAN.
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(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday November 18 2015, @11:04PM
What we're doing didn't work so we need to do more of it.
The problem is that they have concentrated ALL of their efforts on clandestine data collection of private citizens, trying to track every bit of communication rather than concentrating on facts on the ground. They've built a wheat and chaff problem of gargantuan proportions.
They used to be very good at facts on the ground. Who boarded what train. Travel end-points. Arms shipments. Car rentals. Money flow.
Collections of bad guys all leaving X country for Y country.
Now all they know is who talks to who.
They for years were adamant that they were not collecting actual conversations. So why are they worried about encryption?
Its ONLY that latter bit, the "full take" that they increasingly can't get ahold of.
But they never had that historically and have only recently become dependent on it.
They've put all their eggs in one basket and left that basket to be monitored by the supercomputers. Tradecraft is a thing of the past.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19 2015, @03:48AM
On the Tonight Show, actor Shia Labeouf said an FBI agent played back one of Labeouf's phone calls to him and told him that one-fifth of all calls were being recorded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ux1hpLvqMw [youtube.com]