[phkn1]

"American and French officials say there is still no definitive evidence to back up their presumption that the terrorists who massacred 129 people in Paris used new, difficult-to-crack encryption technologies to organize the plot."

IMO, that is the only part of the article that needs to be understood.

[mc32]

Let's say these terrorists were naïve or technical luddites. Why would future perpetrators also be presumed to remain luddites?

Second, what would you propose _if_ they are found to have used encryption to avoid detection, would that make a difference? Or do we come up with a better reason to exculpate encryption?

If encryption is not a bogey-thing, then it's irrelevant whether it was used or not. We don't need confirmation it was not used.

[jacquesm]

Let's say they're not naive, and that they are not technical Luddites but merely clever enough to realize that if they used channels that can be listened in on easily or that are known to be monitored that their chances of success would go down and their chances of spending the rest of their miserable little lives in jail would go up.

Assuming terrorists are naive, Luddites and/or dumb is a dangerous mistake, it presumes that terrorist organizations are mostly old guys with beards rather than that they draw support from all levels of society, including IT personnel.

Encryption does not factor into terrorist prevention to-date as far as I can see, what terrorist plots were foiled were foiled in very old-fashioned and low-tech ways, mostly depending on a lucky break because someone saw something suspicious.

Encryption does factor into the desire of the various agencies to be able to look into our private lives at every turn. Of course no such agency would ever abuse such power.

If resources will be diverted from more risky and/or longer term strategies to increase the dragnet surveillance capabilities we will be doing exactly the wrong thing, given the fact that the current capabilities are far from insignificant and the fact that each and every one of the major attacks in recent history had one or more known perpetrators and plenty of early warning signs.

The failure is embarrassing, but of course it is the tools that are to be blamed, not the strategy since that would imply some people are not doing their jobs too well.

The whole encryption thing is a side show and does nothing to actually make the day to day lives of people in Western Europe or the Americas any safer.

Finally, it's not as if the terrorist groups aren't going to be able to continue the tools they already have, which have encryption capabilities far outstripping our present day ability to break in a short enough window of time (say 48 hours) to be able to intercept a terrorist team on the way to doing their deeds.

Encryption used for the purposes of terrorism doesn't have to hold forever, it only has to hold long enough to be able to carry out an attack unhindered.

It's not as if these guys are going to be yakking on their cell phones to co-ordinate a group buy of Kalashnikovs and ammo via BuyWithMe.

[mc32]

So when the feds go in and raid a company and demand hard drives to investigate illegal activity which criminals typically know to hide and try their best to hide, you think that's futile and agencies are better off not relying on this kind of data because criminals are unlikely to make any mistakes in covering their tracks?

So agencies are doing things backwards by relying on this kind of operational data search? They should be doing more stakeouts and rely more on people ratting them out?

[venomsnake]

> new, difficult-to-crack encryption technologies

Have there been any NEW encryption technologies lately? The only one I can think of is ZRTP. Everything else is based on well understood and well tested theories.

[sarciszewski]

Sort of.

http://sphincs.cr.yp.to

Not only is this a NEW cryptography technology, it's also the most hilarious academic web page I've ever read.

[mirimir]

Pond is pretty cool. But the encryption methods are, of course, standard. It's how they're used that's innovative.

The reference is likely to various idiot-friendly apps. I doubt that any of them is harder to crack than, for example, Sigaint with GnuPG (via Tor onion services).

[biokoda]

Axolotl Ratchet protocol which is currently the safest end-to-end encryption method is pretty new.