What Role Did Encryption Play in Paris?
Glenn Greenwald has seen the big picture in Paris. With 129 people dead, terrorists still at large, and ISIS crowing over the carnage, Greenwald has jumped on the real problem: Someone, somewhere might think the Edward Snowden leaks had something to do with an attack to which our signals intelligence was blind.
"It’s of course unsurprising that ever since Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing enabled newspapers around the world to report on secretly implemented programs of mass surveillance, he has been accused by 'officials' and their various media allies of Helping The Terrorists™," Greenwald writes in a lengthy tirade over at The Intercept. "The implicit premise of this accusation is that The Terrorists didn’t know to avoid telephones or how to use effective encryption until Snowden came along and told them. Yet we’ve been warned for years and years before Snowden that The Terrorists are so diabolical and sophisticated that they engage in all sorts of complex techniques to evade electronic surveillance."
I actually agree with Greenwald that one cannot blame the Snowden revelations for what happened in Paris—at least not yet, and probably not ever. The simple reason is that we don't yet know what surveillance countermeasures the attackers really took, and—just as importantly—we don't know what surveillance countermeasures they would have taken had Snowden not blown all of the programs he exposed. The most one can blame Snowden for is making it far more likely that terrorists could undertake an attack like that in Paris without having their communications intercepted and decrypted.
Just as one cannot attribute any specific weather event to climate change, it's not responsible—absent very specific evidence of terrorist tradecraft—to attribute any specific terrorist event to Snowden.
The more interesting question is what, if anything, the Paris atrocities can teach us about the "going dark" debate and encryption. Unlike the specific role of the Snowden revelations in informing the tactical choices of the attackers, this is a matter on which we can expect information to develop. Specifically, we can expect to learn whether the attackers were using encrypted channels of the type FBI Director James Comey has been warning about for the past year. And we can expect to learn as well whether the attackers avoided specific channels where they believed surveillance was possible.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-role-did-encryption-play-paris
#SnowdenEffect... Good to see Greenwald has a singular focus on what's really important in the Paris attacks, and that is protecting the image of his meal ticket...
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