The 28 Pages

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On Sunday, President Obama said this about about Hillary’s email scandal: “There’s classified & then there’s classified.”

Perhaps that’s what has led him to decide, after 15 years, the 28 pages on the Saudis’ role in 9/11 can finally be released (or at least reviewed for declassification; given the way the 60 Minutes script ignored evidence about Bandar bin Sultan, I suspect they’ll still protect him).

The ostensible precipitating factor was a 60 Minutes show that, as I understand, didn’t expose anything we haven’t known for a decade (for comparison see this declaration Bob Graham submitted last year in a suit against the Saudis). But given the way 60 Minutes have become a house organ for the Intelligence Community, and given the way Nancy Pelosi had a statement (emphasizing her long role in Intelligence oversight, such as it exists) endorsing the disclosure all ready to go,

“As the former Ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and top the House Democrat on the Joint Congressional investigation looking into the 9/11 attacks, I agree with former Senator Bob Graham that these documents should be declassified and made public, and that the Bush Administration’s refusal to do so was a mistake,” Pelosi said in a statement. “I have always advocated for providing as much transparency as possible to the American people consistent with protecting our national security.”

I gotta believe this was all orchestrated.

After pretending the Saudis have been good faith partners for 15 years, in spite of abundant evidence evidence they have always continued to support terrorism as a tool in their bid for power, it seems, the Intelligence Committee has finally decided it was convenient to be able to discuss the Saudi role in 9/11.

Mind you, if the IC was really serious about discussing what bad partners the Saudis have always been, they should also declassify the other abundant evidence that the Saudis have been playing two sides with us.

But that would discomfort a good many Americans, I suspect.

CIA Officers Didn’t Carry Out Waterboarding

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A lot of people are pointing to John Brennan’s assurances that CIA won’t ever torture again as if it means anything (usually ignoring Brennan’s motivation from institutional preservation, not efficacy or morality or legality).

CIA Director John Brennan told NBC News in an exclusive interview that his agency will not engage in harsh “enhanced interrogation” practices, including waterboarding, which critics call torture — even if ordered to by a future president.

“I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I’ve heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure,” Brennan said.

[snip]

When asked specifically about waterboarding Brennan could not have been clearer.

“Absolutely, I would not agree to having any CIA officer carrying out waterboarding again,” he said.

There are a lot of reasons this doesn’t mean anything, starting with the fact that President Trump could easily fire Brennan and replace him with someone pro torture.

But it’s funny, too, because Brennan’s assurances about waterboarding would hold true even for the period when CIA was waterboarding detainees. Because CIA officers didn’t do the waterboarding.

As a reminder, at least four detainees were known to be waterboarded under the Gloves Come Off Memorandum of Notification. The first, Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, was waterboarded by Egyptian intelligence, though with Americans present.

The others were waterboarded as part of torture led by Mitchell and Jessen, who were not CIA officers, but instead contractors. CIA officers were definitely involved in that torture (as they were present for our outsourced Egyptian torture). But the torture was technically done by contractors.

Don’t get me wrong: CIA officers did engage in a whole lot of torture directly.

But Brennan’s squirmy language should only emphasize the fact that even when CIA was in the business of waterboarding, CIA officers didn’t do the waterboarding. So Brennan’s guarantees that CIA officers won’t do so in the future are pretty meaningless guarantees.

Wednesday Morning: Wicked Weary World

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Let’s have a brunch-time salute to Belgium, which produced this fine young artist Loic Nottet. Too bad there’s not much well-produced content in YouTube yet by this youngster. He has incredible upper range reach with great potential because of the power behind his voice. Hope to hear more by him soon; he’s a sweet antidote to bitter wickedness.

All in the family
Hope you’ve read Marcy’s piece already this morning on the relevance of nuclear family units to terrorism. In addition to suicide bombers El Bakraoui brothers Marcy mentioned, it’s worth examining the other links between the November 13 attacks in Paris and the attacks in Belgium yesterday. Note the familial relationships and their first-degree network:

Brahim Abdelslam — older brother of Salah, blew himself up in Paris during the November 15 attacks. (Dead)
Salah Abdelslam — captured last Friday March 18, has admitted he ‘had planned to target Brussels.’ His location was flagged by an unusual number of pizzas delivered to an apartment where power and water had been shut off. (In custody)

Abaid Aberkan — characterized as a relation of the Abdelslams, carried Brahim’s casket at the funeral last week. (NOT a terror suspect Edit: Le Monde indicates Aberkan was arrested during Friday’s raid, but name spelled ‘Abid.’) (In custody)
Aberkan’s mother — renter/owner of Molenbeek apartment in which Salah was hiding when captured last week. (NOT a terror suspect)

Mohamed Belkaid — killed in a raid last Tuesday at an apartment in Forest district; Salah fled the apartment. (Dead)

Mohamed Abrini — A childhood friend and neighbor of Salah, his younger brother Suleymane died fighting in an Islamist militia under the direction of Abdelhamid Abaaoud. Abaaoud, the leader of the Paris attacks, died on November 18 during a police raid. Abrini had traveled with both of the Abdelslam brothers the week before the attacks in Paris. He is now on the run and sought in relation to yesterday’s attack. (Suspect)

Najim Laachraoui — traveled with Salah and Belkaid last September, under the name Soufiane Kayal. His DNA was found in three different locations: on explosives in Paris, and at two other hide-outs used by attackers. He is now sought in relation to yesterday’s attack. (Suspect)

Though we’ll hear arguments for increased internet surveillance, it’s easy to see that traditional police work could identify a terrorist network of family and friends in the same way members of an organized crime syndicate centered around a family are revealed. (Sources for the above: The Guardian and The Australian)

Other stuff going on…

  • ‘Flash Crash’ trader to be extradited to the U.S., rule British judges (France24)
  • Sextortionist Michael Ford, who ran a criminal enterprise from his work computer while employed at U.S. embassy, sentenced to four years and nine months in prison (Ars Technica) — BoingBoing notes the hypocrisy of a government demanding backdoors while failing to note such a massive misuse of its own network.
  • Another hospital held hostage by ransomware, this time in Kentucky (Krebs on Security) — STOP OPENING LINKS IN EMAIL at work, for starters. Isolating email systems from all other networked operations would be better.
  • 24 car models by 19 automakers vulnerable to keyless entry hack (WIRED–mind the ad-block hate) — Mostly foreign models affected due to the radio frequency used.

Better luck tomorrow, gang. See you in the morning.

How to Protect against Terrorism: Eliminate the Valuable Terrorist Technology, the Nuclear Family

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In addition to catching the third Brussels airport bomber,Najim Laachraoui, a known Salah Abdelslam associate, authorities in Europe have also revealed that the other two airport bombers were brothers, Khalid and Ibrahim El Bakraoui.

 

Police sources earlier told NBC News that Khalid El Bakraoui, 27, and 30-year-old sibling Ibrahim blew themselves up. Both had been convicted of violent crimes in the past and had links to one of the Paris attackers.

The El Bakraouis join an increasingly long list of recent terrorists who partner within their nuclear family (the Boston Marathon attack, Charlie Hebdo attack, and Paris attack were all carried out by brothers, and the San Bernardino attack was carried out by spouses). As New America noted in November (that is before several more family launched attacks), 30% of the fighters they’ve identified had family ties to jihad.

One-third of Western fighters have a familial connection to jihad, whether through relatives currently fighting in Syria or Iraq, marriage, or some other link to jihadists from prior conflicts or attacks. Of those with a familial link, almost two-thirds have a relative fighting in this conflict and almost one-third are connected through marriage, many of them new marriages conducted after arriving in Syria.

There has been less attention (though there has been some) about the operational advantages organizing attacks among family members offers. Not only would there be far more face-to-face conversations in any case (which you’d need a physical bug to collect), but even electronic communications metadata might not attract any attention, except insofar as helping to geolocate the parties. It’d be hard to distinguish, from metadata, between brothers or spouses discussing taking care of their kids from the same family members plotting to blow something up.

Family ties then, along with a reportedly difficult Moroccan dialect, may function to provide as much security as any (limited, given the reports) use of encryption. And all that’s on top of the cell’s extensive use of burner phones.

Using Jim Comey, um, logic, we might consider eliminating this threat by eliminating the nuclear family. Sure, the overwhelming majority of people who use it are law-abiding people obtaining valuable benefit from nuclear family. Sure, for the most vulnerable, family ties provide the most valuable kind of support to keep someone healthy. But bad guys exploit it too, and we can’t have that.

I mean, perhaps there should be an honest public discussion about the proportional value the nuclear family gives to terrorists and to others. But why would we have that discussion for the nuclear family and not for encryption?

Update: as soon as I posted this I saw notice that Belgian press (and with them NBC, apparently) got the identity of the third hijacker wrong, so I’ve crossed out and/or taken out those references.

DOJ’s Pre-Ass-Handing Capitulation

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In its February 16 application for an All Writs Act to force Apple to help crack Syed Rizwan Farook’s phone, DOJ asserted,

Apple has the exclusive technical means which would assist the government in completing its search, but has declined to provide that assistance voluntarily.

[snip]

2. The government requires Apple’s assistance to access the SUBJECT DEVICE to determine, among other things, who Farook and Malik may have communicated with to plan and carry out the IRC shootings, where Farook and Malik may have traveled to and from before and after the incident, and other pertinent information that would provide more information about their and others’ involvement in the deadly shooting.

[snip]

3. As an initial matter, the assistance sought can only be provided by Apple.

[snip]

4. Because iOS software must be cryptographically signed by Apple, only Apple is able to modify the iOS software to change the setting or prevent execution of the function.

[snip]

5. Apple’s assistance is necessary to effectuate the warrant.

[snip]

6. This indicates to the FBI that Farook may have disabled the automatic iCloud backup function to hide evidence, and demonstrates that there may be relevant, critical communications and data around the time of the shooting that has thus far not been accessed, may reside solely on the SUBJECT DEVICE, and cannot be accessed by any other means known to either the government or Apple.

FBI’s forensics guy Christopher Pluhar claimed,

7. I have explored other means of obtaining this information with employees of Apple and with technical experts at the FBI, and we have been unable to identify any other methods feasible for gaining access to the currently inaccessible data stored within the SUBJECT DEVICE.

On February 19, DOJ claimed,

8. The phone may contain critical communications and data prior to and around the time of the shooting that, thus far: (1) has not been accessed; (2) may reside solely on the phone; and (3) cannot be accessed by any other means known to either the government or Apple.

[snip]

9. Apple left the government with no option other than to apply to this Court for the Order issued on February 16, 2016.

[snip]

10. Accordingly, there may be critical communications and data prior to and around the time of the shooting that thus far has not been accessed, may reside solely on the SUBJECT DEVICE; and cannot be accessed by any other means known to either the government or Apple.

[snip]

11. Especially but not only because iPhones will only run software cryptographically signed by Apple, and because Apple restricts access to the source code of the software that creates these obstacles, no other party has the ability to assist the government in preventing these features from obstructing the search ordered by the Court pursuant to the warrant.

[snip]

12. Apple’s close relationship to the iPhone and its software, both legally and technically – which are the produce of Apple’s own design – makes compelling assistance from Apple a permissible and indispensable means of executing the warrant.

[snip]

13. Apple’s assistance is also necessary to effectuate the warrant.

[snip]

14. Moreover, as discussed above, Apple’s assistance is necessary because without the access to Apple’s software code and ability to cryptographically sign code for the SUBJECT DEVICE that only Apple has, the FBI cannot attempt to determine the passcode without fear of permanent loss of access to the data or excessive time delay. Indeed, after reviewing a number of other suggestions to obtain the data from the SUBJECT DEVICE with Apple, technicians from both Apple and the FBI agreed that they were unable to identify any other methods – besides that which is now ordered by this Court – that are feasible for gaining access to the currently inaccessible data on the SUBJECT DEVICE. There can thus be no question that Apple’s assistance is necessary, and that the Order was therefore properly issued.

Almost immediately after the government made these claims, a number of security researchers I follow not only described ways FBI might be able to get into the phone, but revealed that FBI had not returned calls with suggestions.

On February 25, Apple pointed out the government hadn’t exhausted possible of means of getting into the phone.

Moreover, the government has not made any showing that it sought or received technical assistance from other federal agencies with expertise in digital forensics, which assistance might obviate the need to conscript Apple to create the back door it now seeks. See Hanna Decl. Ex. DD at 34–36 [October 26, 2015 Transcript] (Judge Orenstein asking the government “to make a representation for purposes of the All Writs Act” as to whether the “entire Government,” including the “intelligence community,” did or did not have the capability to decrypt an iPhone, and the government responding that “federal prosecutors don’t have an obligation to consult the intelligence community in order to investigate crime”). As such, the government has not demonstrated that “there is no conceivable way” to extract data from the phone.

On March 1, members of Congress and House Judiciary Committee witness Susan Landau suggested there were other ways to get into the phone (indeed, Darrell Issa, who was one who made that point, is doing a bit of a victory lap). During the hearing, as Jim Comey insisted that if people had ways to get into the phone, they should call FBI, researchers noted they had done so and gotten no response.

Issa: Is the burden so high on you that you could not defeat this product, either through getting the source code and changing it or some other means? Are you testifying to that?

Comey: I see. We wouldn’t be litigating if we could. We have engaged all parts of the U.S. Government to see does anybody that has a way, short of asking Apple to do it, with a 5C running iOS 9 to do this, and we don not.

[snip]

a) Comey: I have reasonable confidence, in fact, I have high confidence that all elements of the US government have focused on this problem and have had great conversations with Apple. Apple has never suggested to us that there’s another way to do it other than what they’ve been asked to do in the All Writs Act.

[snip]

b) Comey [in response to Chu]: We’ve talked to anybody who will talk to us about it, and I welcome additional suggestions. Again, you have to be very specific: 5C running iOS 9, what are the capabilities against that phone. There are versions of different phone manufacturers and combinations of models and operating system that it is possible to break a phone without having to ask the manufacturer to do it. We have not found a way to break the 5C running iOS 9.

[snip]

c) Comey [in response to Bass]: There are actually 16 other members of the US intelligence community. It pains me to say this, because I — in a way, we benefit from the myth that is the product of maybe too much television. The only thing that’s true on television is we remain very attractive people, but we don’t have the capabilities that people sometimes on TV imagine us to have. If we could have done this quietly and privately we would have done it.

[snip]

Cicilline: I think this is a very important question for me. If, in fact — is it in fact the case that the government doesn’t have the ability, including the Department of Homeland Security Investigations, and all of the other intelligence agencies to do what it is that you claim is necessary to access this information?

d) Comey: Yes.

While Comey’s statements were not so absolutist as to suggest that only Apple could break into this phone, Comey repeatedly said the government could not do it.

On March 10, DOJ claimed,

15. The government and the community need to know what is on the terrorist’s phone, and the government needs Apple’s assistance to find out.

[snip]

16. Apple alone can remove those barriers so that the FBI can search the phone, and it can do so without undue burden.

[snip]

17. Without Apple’s assistance, the government cannot carry out the search of Farook’s iPhone authorized by the search warrant. Apple has ensured that its assistance is necessary by requiring its electronic signature to run any program on the iPhone. Even if the Court ordered Apple to provide the government with Apple’s cryptographic keys and source code, Apple itself has implied that the government could not disable the requisite features because it “would have insufficient knowledge of Apple’s software and design protocols to be effective.”

[snip]

18. Regardless, even if absolute necessity were required, the undisputed evidence is that the FBI cannot unlock Farook’s phone without Apple’s assistance.

[snip]

19. Apple deliberately established a security paradigm that keeps Apple intimately connected to its iPhones. This same paradigm makes Apple’s assistance necessary for executing the lawful warrant to search Farook’s iPhone.

On March 15, SSCI Member Ron Wyden thrice suggested someone should ask NSA if they could hack into this phone.

On March 21, DOJ wrote this:

Specifically, since recovering Farook’s iPhone on December 3, 2015, the FBI has continued to research methods to gain access to the data stored on it. The FBI did not cease its efforts after this litigation began. As the FBI continued to conduct its own research, and as a result of the worldwide publicity and attention on this case, others outside the U.S. government have continued to contact the U.S. government offering avenues of possible research.

On Sunday, March 20, 2016, an outside party demonstrated to the FBI a possible method for unlocking Farook’s iPhone

You might think that FBI really did suddenly find a way to hack the phone, after insisting over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over they could only get into it with Apple’s help. Indeed, the described timing coincides remarkably well with the announcement that some Johns Hopkins researchers had found a flaw in iMessage’s encryption (which shouldn’t relate at all to breaking into such phones, though it is possible FBI is really after iMessages they think will be on the phone). Indeed, in describing the iMessage vulnerability, Johns Hopkins prof Matthew Green ties the discovery to the Apple fight.

Now before I go further, it’s worth noting that the security of a text messaging protocol may not seem like the most important problem in computer security. And under normal circumstances I might agree with you. But today the circumstances are anything but normal: encryption systems like iMessage are at the center of a critical national debate over the role of technology companies in assisting law enforcement.

A particularly unfortunate aspect of this controversy has been the repeated call for U.S. technology companies to add “backdoors” to end-to-end encryption systems such as iMessage. I’ve always felt that one of the most compelling arguments against this approach — an argument I’ve made along with other colleagues — is that we just don’t know how to construct such backdoors securely. But lately I’ve come to believe that this position doesn’t go far enough — in the sense that it is woefully optimistic. The fact of the matter is that forget backdoors: webarely know how to make encryption workat all. If anything, this work makes me much gloomier about the subject.

Plus, as Rayne noted to me earlier, Ellen Nakashima’s first report on this went up just after midnight on what would be the morning of March 21, suggesting she had an embargo (though that may be tied to Apple’s fix for the vulnerability). [Update: Correction — her story accidentally got posted then unposted earlier than that.]

But that would require ignoring the 19 plus times (ignoring Jim Comey’s March 1 testimony) that DOJ insisted the only way they could get into the phone was by having Apple’s help hacking it (though note most of those claims only considered the ways that Apple might crack the phone, not ways that, say, NSA might). You’d have to ignore the problems even within these statements. You’d have to ignore the conflicting sworn testimony from FBI’s witnesses (including Jim Comey).

It turns out FBI’s public argument went to shit fast. Considering the likelihood they screwed up with the forensics on this phone and that there’s absolutely nothing of interest on the phone, I take this as an easy retreat for them.

But that doesn’t mean this is over. Remember, FBI has already moved to unlock this iPhone, of similar vintage to Farook’s, which seems more central to an actual investigation (even if FBI won’t be able to scream terrorterrorterror). There are two more encrypted phones FBI has asked Apple to break open.

But for now, I take this as FBI’s attempt to take its claims back into the shadows, where it’s not so easy to expose the giant holes in their claims.

Updated with Comey testimony.

Tuesday Morning: Été Frappé

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[graphic: Map of Belgian attacks 22MAR2016 for Le Monde via Eric Beziat]

[graphic: Map of Belgian attacks 22MAR2016 for Le Monde via Eric Beziat]

Whatever I was going to write today has been beaten into submission by current events.

Woke up to news about alleged terror attacks in Belgium — social media was a mess, a deluge of information with little organization. Best I can tell from French language news outlets including Le Monde, the first attack was at 8:00 a.m. local time at the Zaventem Airport just outside Brussels. The second attack occurred at the metro station Maelbeek at 9:11 a.m. Both attacks appeared use bombs, unlike the Paris attack this past year — two at the airport, one at the metro. Reports indicate 15 deaths and 55 seriously injured so far.

A third explosion reported in the city at a different location in the city of Brussels has been attributed to the controlled detonation of a suspicious package after the second attack.

In the time gap between the two attacks, one might suppose many law enforcement and military would have gone to the airport to respond to the first attack. Was there synchronization by planned schedule, or was there coordination by communication?

However, communications may have been difficult as telecom networks were quickly flooded. How soon were the telecom networks overloaded? Or were the networks throttled for observation? We may not ever know.

It’s worth reexamining what Marcy wrote about the communications found after Paris attack (here and here). It may be relevant if the same practices were used by the attackers in Brussels.

Important to note that Paris terror attack suspect Salah Abdeslam was arrested March 18 in a raid in Brussels. He is believed to have transported several of the attackers to the Stade de France just before the November 13 attack. Abdeslam may have been one of several suspects who fled from another earlier raid during which another suspect was killed.

Still working on the order issued late yesterday vacating today’s planned hearing on #AppleVsFBI. The order is here.

UPDATE — 9:30 a.m. EST — Marcy will be posting in a bit about the #AppleVsFBI hearing that wasn’t.

Another interesting story that broke in France today: French Supreme Court affirmed a previous lower court decision which ruled legal the wiretapping of former president Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy has been under investigation for various forms of influence peddling since 2010, including receipt of campaign funds from Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2007.

UPDATE — 1:00 p.m. EST/5:00 p.m. London/6:00 p.m. Brussels, Paris —

Now into the post-emergency recovery stage — all manner of political functionaries and talking heads have offered their two bits on this morning’s attacks. Three days of mourning have been declared in Belgium. Pictures of the alleged bombers at the airport taken by security video camera have now been published. The airport attackers detonated their weapons in the pre-security check-in area. 34 deaths have now been reported as a result of the attacks for which ISIS has now claimed responsibility. Across the Channel, the UK remains on alert for multiple attacks after last week’s raid in Brussels; UK travelers have been discouraged from traveling to Brussels.

Timeline (via Agence France-Presse)

22 mars Peu après 09h00/22 March Shortly after 9:00 a.m.
Explosion dans la station de métro Maelbeek.
Explosion in the Maelbeek metro station.

22 mars 08h00/22 March 8:00 a.m.
Deux explosions a l’aeroport. Possible kamikaze.
Two explosions at the airport. Possible suicide bomber.

21 mars/21 March
[Suspect] Najim Laachraoui, dont l’ADN a été retrouvé sur des explosifs, identifié et activement recherché.
Najim Laachraoui, whose DNA was found on explosives, identified and actively sought.

18 mars/18 March
Salah Abdeslam arête à Molenbeek.
Abdeslam Salah arrested in Molenbeek.

15 mars/15 March
Fusillade, quartier Forest – Mohammed Belkaid, lié aux auteurs de attentats de Paris du 13 novembre est tué. Empreintes de Salah Abdeslam retrouvées.
Shooting, Forest district – Mohamed Belkaid, linked to Paris attack planners of November 13, killed. Footprints of Salah Abdeslam found.

Are the Authorities Confusing a PRISM Problem with an Encryption Problem?

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CNN has its own version of updated reporting from the Paris attack. It provides a completely predictable detail inexplicably not included in the weekend’s big NYT story: that the one phone with any content on it — as distinct from a pure burner — had Telegram loaded on it.

Several hours earlier, at 2:14 p.m., while they were still at the Alfortville hotel, the Bataclan attackers had downloaded the encryption messaging app Telegram onto their Samsung smart phone, according to police reports. No recovered content from the messaging app is mentioned in the French police documents, suggesting there were likely communications by the Bataclan attackers that will never be recovered.

As well as offering end-to-end encryption, the Telegram messaging app offers an option for users to “self-destruct” messages. At 4:39 p.m. on November 13, one of the attackers downloaded detailed floor plans of the Bataclan venue onto the Samsung phone and conducted online searches for the American rock band playing there that night, the Eagles of Death Metal.

I predicted as much in my post on that NYT story.

My suspicion is that, as had been reported, rather than emails ISIS relied on Telegram, but used in such a fashion that would make it less useful on burner phones (“secret” Telegram chat are device specific, meaning you’d need a persistent phone number to use that function). But if these terrorists did use Telegram, they probably eluded authorities not because of encryption, but because it’s fairly easy to make such chats temporary (again, using the secret function). Without Telegram being part of PRISM, the NSA would have had to obtain the metadata for chats via other means, and by the time they IDed the phones of interest, there may have been no metadata left.

If ISIS’ use of Telegram (which was publicly acknowledged when Telegram shut down a bunch of ISIS channels in the wake of the attack) is what anonymous sources keep insisting is an encryption problem, then it suggests the problem is being misportrayed as an encryption one.

True, Telegram does offer the option of end to end encryption for its messaging. There are questions about its encryption (though thus far it hasn’t been broken publicly). So it does offer users the ability to carry out secret chats and to then destroy them, which may be where the concern about all the “scoured” “email” in the NYT piece comes from, the assumption these terrorists have used Telegram but deleted those messages.

But as the Grugq points out, it’s a noisy app in other ways that the NSA should be able to exploit.

Contact Theft

When registering an account with Telegram, the app helpfully uploads the entire Contacts database to Telegram’s servers (optional on iOS). This allows Telegram to build a huge social network map of all the users and how they know each other. It is extremely difficult to remain anonymous while using Telegram because the social network of everyone you communicate with is known to them (and whomever has pwned their servers).

Contact books are extremely valuable information. We know that the NSA went to great lengths to steal them from instant messenger services. On mobile the contact lists are even more important because they are very frequently linked to real world identities.

Voluminous Metadata

Anything using a mobile phone exposes a wide range of metadata. In addition to all the notification flows through Apple and Google’s messaging services, there is the IP traffic flows to/from those servers, and the data on the Telegram servers. If I were a gambling man, I’d bet those servers have been compromised by nation state intelligence services and all that data is being dumped regularly.

This metadata would expose who talked with who, at what time, where they were located (via IP address), how much was said, etc. There is a huge amount of information in those flows that would more than compensate for lacking access to the content (even if, big assumption, the crypto is solid).

He spends particular time on Telegram’s Secret chat function (the one that allows a person to destroy a chat). But he doesn’t talk about how that might play into the extensive use of burners that we’ve seen from ISIS. Secret chats are device specific (that is, they can be sent only to a numbered device, not an account). That would make the function very hard to integrate with disciplined burner use, because the whole point of burners is not to have persistent telephone numbers. How will a terrorist remember the new number he wants to associate with a Telegram secret chat? Write it on a piece of paper?

In other words, it seems you could use one (disciplined burners) or another (full use of Telegram with persistent phones), the latter of which would provide its own kind of intelligence. It may well be ISIS does merge these two uses, but if so we shouldn’t expect to see Telegram on their true burner phones. Plus, assuming the bearer of the phone speaks that dialect the Belgians were struggling to translate, voice calls on burners would be just as useful as transient use of Telegram.

But that’s probably not the real problem for authorities. In fact, if known terrorists had been using, say, WhatsApp rather than Telegram for such encrypted chats, authorities might have had more information on their network than they do now. That’s because WhatsApp metadata would be available under PRISM, whereas to get Telegram data, non-German authorities are going to have to go steal it.

If that supposition is correct, it would suggest that the US should drop all efforts to make Apple phones’ encryption weaker. So long as it has the presumed best security (notwithstanding the iMessage vulnerability just identified by researchers at Johns Hopkins), people from around the world will choose it, ensuring that the world’s best SIGINT agency could have ready access. If Telegram is perceived as being better — or even being close, given the location — people of all sorts will prefer that.

That won’t give you the content, in either case (even if you had the Moroccan translators you needed to translate, if that indeed remained a problem for authorities). But you’re better off having readily accessible metadata than losing it entirely.

For Counterterrorism Experts, Absence of Evidence Equals Encryption

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The NYT has a fascinating story based on shared criminal files and attack review, describing what authorities currently know about how ISIS pulled off the Paris attack. It describes continued problems with transliteration (though it’s not clear that played a role in this attack).

“We don’t share information,” said Alain Chouet, a former head of French intelligence. “We even didn’t agree on the translations of people’s names that are in Arabic or Cyrillic, so if someone comes into Europe through Estonia or Denmark, maybe that’s not how we register them in France or Spain.”

It describes, over and over, the volume of burner and borrowed phones the attackers used, including a lot of calls that ended up being easy to trace.

After numerous delays, one of the attackers began using a hostage’s cellphone to send text messages to a contact outside. At one point, one of the gunmen turned to a second and said in fluent French, “I haven’t gotten any news yet,” suggesting they were waiting for an update from an accomplice. Then they switched and continued the discussion in Arabic, according to the police report.

[snip]

The attackers seized cellphones from the hostages and tried to use them to get onto the Internet, but data reception was not functioning, Mr. Goeppinger told the police. Their use of hostages’ phones is one of the many details, revealed in the police investigation, pointing to how the Islamic State had refined its tradecraft. Court records and public accounts have detailed how earlier operatives sent to Europe in 2014 and early 2015 made phone calls or sent unencrypted messages that were intercepted, allowing the police to track and disrupt their plots. But the three teams in Paris were comparatively disciplined. They used only new phones that they would then discard, including several activated minutes before the attacks, or phones seized from their victims.

[snip]

Everywhere they went, the attackers left behind their throwaway phones, including in Bobigny, at a villa rented in the name of Ibrahim Abdeslam. When the brigade charged with sweeping the location arrived, it found two unused cellphones still inside their boxes.

New phones linked to the assailants at the stadium and the restaurant also showed calls to Belgium in the hours and minutes before the attacks, suggesting a rear base manned by a web of still unidentified accomplices.

Security camera footage showed Bilal Hadfi, the youngest of the assailants, as he paced outside the stadium, talking on a cellphone. The phone was activated less than an hour before he detonated his vest. From 8:41 p.m. until just before he died at 9:28 p.m., the phone was in constant touch with a phone inside the rental car being driven by Mr. Abaaoud. It also repeatedly called a cellphone in Belgium.

Remember, earlier reports on some of these same terrorists described them using a Moroccan dialect for which Belgian authorities, at least, did not have ready translators, which would make voice calls almost as effective as encrypted communications, especially so long as that common phone number in Belgium remained unknown. The story describes the attackers using Arabic, though doesn’t say whether it was a dialect.

After numerous delays, one of the attackers began using a hostage’s cellphone to send text messages to a contact outside. At one point, one of the gunmen turned to a second and said in fluent French, “I haven’t gotten any news yet,” suggesting they were waiting for an update from an accomplice. Then they switched and continued the discussion in Arabic, according to the police report.

But it then makes an enormous logical leap, from the very first line of the story, that absence of emails equates to some operational security pertaining to emails.

Investigators found crates’ worth of disposable cellphones, meticulously scoured of email data. [See note]

[snip]

According to the police report and interviews with officials, none of the attackers’ emails or other electronic communications have been found, prompting the authorities to conclude that the group used encryption. What kind of encryption remains unknown, and is among the details that Mr. Abdeslam’s capture could help reveal.

[snip]

Most striking is what was not found on the phones: Not a single email or online chat from the attackers has surfaced so far.

What seems most likely from this description is that for phones terrorists used as burners, they simply didn’t load them with apps to conduct more extensive communication. And why would they, especially if they knew from past reporting that their language was proving hard to “decrypt” for authorities, even with time?

Then there’s this description of a laptop that might have used encryption.

One of the terrorists pulled out a laptop, propping it open against the wall, said the 40-year-old woman. When the laptop powered on, she saw a line of gibberish across the screen: “It was bizarre — he was looking at a bunch of lines, like lines of code. There was no image, no Internet,” she said. Her description matches the look of certain encryption software, which ISIS claims to have used during the Paris attacks.

I asked one of the reporters on this story, Rukmini Callimachi, whether the computer showed up in the report; it did not. Which either suggests it was destroyed in one of the suicide vest explosions beyond all forensic use, or wasn’t one of the terrorist laptops at all (or was misremembered by the eyewitness, which would be unsurprising given the unreliable nature of even witnesses who are not, by nature of being hostages, very stressed).

Yet even if this computer had full disc encryption (as opposed to just being a Linux machine, as some people have suggested), there’s no reason to assume there’d be emails. And, as the story makes clear, the phone recovered outside of Bataclan was not encrypted (this was the one that had a text on it).

As the bodies of the dead were being bagged, the police found a white Samsung phone in a trash can outside the Bataclan.

It had Belgian SIM card that had been in use only since the day before the attack. The phone had called just one other number — belonging to an unidentified user in Belgium. Another new detail from the report showed that the phone’s photo album police found images of the concert hall’s layout, as well as Internet searches for “fnacspectacles.com,” a website that sells concert tickets; “bataclan.fr“; and the phrase “Eagles of Death at the Bataclan.”

[snip]

Even though one of the disposable phones was found to have had a Gmail account with the username “yjeanyves1,” the police discovered it was empty, with no messages in the sent or draft folders.

Note, that account name is very French, not at all similar to the names of the perpetrators (see the list here), which makes me wonder whether it’s an artefact of a prior owner, from whom this phone could have been stolen.

My suspicion is that, as had been reported, rather than emails ISIS relied on Telegram, but used in such a fashion that would make it less useful on burner phones (“secret” Telegram chat are device specific, meaning you’d need a persistent phone number to use that function). But if these terrorists did use Telegram, they probably eluded authorities not because of encryption, but because it’s fairly easy to make such chats temporary (again, using the secret function). Without Telegram being part of PRISM, the NSA would have had to obtain the metadata for chats via other means, and by the time they IDed the phones of interest, there may have been no metadata left.

The authorities now have a great deal of evidence on these terrorists. And what it shows is that burner phones used with discipline serve as a far more important operational security tool than encryption. Indeed, at this point, the authorities only claim the terrorists used encryption because they have no evidence of it!

And yet, that doesn’t appear to have stopped the IC from convincing Obama that the Paris terrorists used encryption and so we have to break it here.

Note: On Twitter, Callimachi acknowledged that that first line makes no sense and said she would try to have it changed.

Update: And now it reads like this:

Investigators found crates’ worth of disposable cellphones.

Why Isn’t Jim Comey Crusading against This Tool Used to Hide Terrorist Secrets?

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Several times over the course of Jim Comey’s crusade against strong encryption, I have noted that, if Comey wants to eliminate the tools “bad guys” use to commit crimes, you might as well eliminate the corporation. After all, the corporate structure helped a bunch of banksters do trillions of dollars of damage to the US economy and effectively steal the homes from millions with near-impunity.

It’d be crazy to eliminate the corporation because it’s a tool “bad guys” sometimes use, but that’s the kind of crazy we see in the encryption debate.

Yesterday, Ron Wyden pointed to a more narrow example of the way “bad guys” abuse corporate structures to — among other things — commit terrorism: the shell corporation.

In a letter to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, he laid out several cases where American shell companies had been used to launder money for crime — including terrorism, broadly defined.

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He then asked for answers about several issues. Summarizing:

  • The White House IRS-registration for beneficial information on corporations probably won’t work. Does Treasury have a better plan? Would the Senate and House proposals to have states or Treasury create such a registry provide the ability to track who really owns a corporation?
  • FinCen has proposed a rule that would not only be easily evaded, but might weaken the existing FATCA standard. Has anyone review this?
  • Does FinCen actually think its rule would identify the natural person behind shell companies?
  • Would requiring financial institutions to report balances held by foreigners help information sharing?

They’re good questions but point, generally, to something more telling. We’re not doing what we need to to prevent our own financial system from being used as a tool for terrorism. Unlike encryption, shell companies don’t have many real benefits to society. Worse, it sounds like Treasury is making the problem worse, not better.

Of course, the really powerful crooks have reasons to want to retain the status quo. And so FBI Director Jim Comey has launched no crusade about this much more obvious tool of crime.

On December 10, Intelligence Committees Not Told Any Encrypted Communications Used in San Bernardino

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Here’s what Senate Intelligence Chair Richard Burr and House Intelligence Ranking Member Adam Schiff had to say about a briefing on the San Bernardino attack they attended on December 10.

Lawmakers on Thursday said there was no evidence yet that the two suspected shooters used encryption to hide from authorities in the lead-up to last week’s San Bernardino, Calif., terror attack that killed 14 people.

“We don’t know whether it played a part in this attack,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) told reporters following a closed-door briefing with federal officials on the shootings.

But that hasn’t ruled out the possibility, Burr and others cautioned.

“That’s obviously one issue were very interested in,” House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said. “To what degree were either encrypted devices or communications a part of the impediment of the investigation, either while the events were taking place or to our investigation now?”

The recent terror attacks in San Bernardino and Paris have shed an intense spotlight on encryption.

While no evidence has been uncovered that either plot was hatched via secure communications platforms, lawmakers and federal officials have used the incidents to resurface an argument that law enforcement should have guaranteed access to encrypted data.

On December 10, we should assume from these comments, the Congressmen privy to the country’s most secret intelligence and law enforcement information, were told nothing about a key source of evidence in the San Bernardino attack being encrypted. Schiff made it quite clear the members of Congress in the briefing were quite interested in that question, but nothing they heard in the briefing alerted them to a known trove of evidence being hidden by encryption.

That’s an important benchmark because of details the FBI provided in response to a questions from Ars Tecnica’s Cyrus Farivar. As had been made clear in the warrant, FBI seized the phone on December 3. But the statement also reveals that FBI asked the County to reset Farook’s Apple ID password on December 6. That means they were already working on that phone several days before the briefing to the Intelligence Committee members (it’s unclear whether that briefing was just for the Gang of Four or for both Intelligence Committees).

While, given what Tim Cook described last night, the FBI had not yet asked for Apple’s assistance by that point, the FBI had to have known what they were dealing with by December 6 — an iPhone 5C running iOS9. Therefore, they would have known the phone was encrypted by default (and couldn’t be open with a fingerprint).

Yet even four days later, they were not sufficiently interested in that phone they had to have known to be encrypted to tell Congress it held key data.

Update: Wow, this, from Apple’s motion to vacate the order, makes this all the more damning.

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