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Paris terrorists used burner phones, not encryption 
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New details of the Paris attacks carried out last November reveal that it was the consistent use of prepaid burner phones, not encryption, that helped keep the terrorists off the radar of the intelligence services.

As an article in The New York Times reports: "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."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016 ... ncryption/

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As The New York Times says, one of the most striking aspects of the phones is that not a single e-mail or online chat message from the attackers was found on them. That seems to be further evidence that they knew such communications were routinely monitored by intelligence agencies. But rather than trying to avoid discovery by using encryption—which would in itself have drawn attention to their accounts—they seem to have stopped using the Internet as a communication channel altogether, and turned to standard cellular network calls on burner phones.

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Tue Mar 22, 2016 12:19 pm
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At the time I seem to recall them being sure that they'd generally avoided electronic communication in favour of face to face meetings. Particularly galling as IIRC they were know the security services.

Ultimately, if a group of people intend to do harm and have any common sense they will avoid communication methods that are suspect which makes a mockery of various governments insistence that they need to be able to monitor everyone all the time because terrorism. It's lazy, invasive and only really harms law abiding citizens on the off chance that someone with fell intent slips up.

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Tue Mar 22, 2016 12:35 pm
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I think there's a complacency ( and maybe racism) that the terrorists are less technologically able, and the west could always outsmart them.


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Tue Mar 22, 2016 12:36 pm
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TheFrenchun wrote:
I think there's a complacency ( and maybe racism) that the terrorists are less technologically able, and the west could always outsmart them.


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They are clearly technologically able, and savvy enough to realise that there are times when you don’t use anything like that. There is wisdom in knowing when not to use a thing, even if that thing is a great facilitator.

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Tue Mar 22, 2016 12:40 pm
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I think the assumption has long been that tech means you won't have to physically track these people, hence the continual 'known to the security services' reports after atrocities. They need informers or plants to start with, combined with physical taps after. It's still working over here for the most part, and how many of our native jihadis have we tried to recruit but utterly failed, pushing them further in but then ignoring them?!

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Tue Mar 22, 2016 1:03 pm
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