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posted by martyb on Thursday November 19 2015, @03:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the hiding-in-plain-sight dept.

From Techdirt and The Intercept :

In the wake of the tragic events in Paris last week, encryption has been a useful bogeyman for those with a voracious appetite for surveillance expansion. Like clockwork, numerous reports have circulated in the days since, blaming everyone from Snowden to Sony for letting the attackers make their plans in secret, protected by encryption.

"Yet news emerging from Paris, as well as evidence from a Belgian ISIS raid in January — suggests that the ISIS terror networks involved were communicating in the clear, and that the data on their smartphones was not encrypted." The reports note that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the "mastermind" of both the Paris attacks and a thwarted Belgium attack ten months ago, failed to use encryption whatsoever.

That's not to say dangerous organizations like ISIS don't use encryption, and won't do so going forward. Everybody uses encryption, or at least should. But the point remains that to use a tragedy to vilify encryption, push for surveillance expansion, and pass backdoor laws that will make everybody less safe -- is nearly as gruesome as the attacks themselves.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by The Archon V2.0 on Thursday November 19 2015, @06:51PM

    by The Archon V2.0 (3887) on Thursday November 19 2015, @06:51PM (#265445)

    > Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the "mastermind"

    Yes, please put that in quotes. These guys are not geniuses - they're people. There's some genuinely smart ones, some clever ones, some average ones, and a lot of idiots. For our own sense of security we like to pretend our society is a citadel, only harmed by the greatest of fiendish geniuses. It really isn't; some idiots with guns and a bit of luck can cause havoc. The reality is that the reason this kind of thing is rare is because murdering psychopaths aren't common. But we don't like that idea since it puts our safety in the hands of chance, so we build a nice little fortress narrative around ourselves, fed by our fears and the tribal "us vs. them" mentality every human has.

    We can't afford to pretend these guys are all Lex Luthor copies, or we're going to start thinking of our guys as being Superman copies. And I seriously don't want the idea that the NSA is the champion of Truth, Justice, and the American Way to get ingrained into people. After all, if Superman wants to see your telephone records, what would it hurt? He's such a nice guy! He must have a good reason!

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