More on the War on Crypto, Inspired by Paris

Darren KitchenThreatWire captures the issues at stake when states take aim at crypto:

The Paris attacks and the Intelligence Community’s Renewed Attack On Internet Crypto

There are a number of stories circulating about calls from the intelligence community to backdoor encrypted communications in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks by ISIS. Some of these stories personally blame Edward Snowden for these attacks.

The desire for the powers that be to have access to all means of communications is not new. In fact, government surveillance of telecommunications without a warrant dates back to the telegraph.

Wanting to monitor enemy communications makes sense from a tactical standpoint. Knowing what your enemy is communicating gives you a tremendous advantage on the battlefield. The problem with monitoring everything is that it violates the rights to privacy of literally everyone. That means that in the war on terror, everyone’s 4th  and 5th Amendment rights are collateral damage.Signals Intelligence is important, make no mistake. It can also be a boondoggle. Like computer forensics, intelligence offers you a tremendous number of tools that you can employ to gather all manner of information, but if you are looking in the wrong place, you can end up allocating a lot of resources and end up with not much in terms of useful or actionable information. Case in point, the East German Stasi who spied on so many of its own citizens and missed the warning signs that the Berlin Wall was going to come down.

One notable bit of info from these stories is that there could be some sort of ISIS help desk available 24×7 to assist with subverting American surveillance, which I think is pretty funny. It conjures to my mind the image of a young jihadist wearing a headset and being yelled at by a heavily armed cleric who is insisting that “I don’t need to turn it off and on again!” Finally there is a tech support job that must suck even more than working for doctors 🙂