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Twittering to Terrorists
The new fun, cool technology can help savvy jihadists track and kill American soldiers.
Ever since Ugh the Caveman, there’s been an ongoing struggle: on the one hand, keep communications secret; on the other, crack the secrets of the other guy’s communications.
This was true when “communication” was smoke signals and hand gestures, remained true when Julius Caesar popularized ciphers, and is still true today; we just have fancier methods. But I’ve been involved in intelligence and computer security stuff, off and on, for about thirty years, and if there’s anything I’ve learned from it, it’s that I can always expect fresh amusement from the popular press.
This weekend’s amusement comes from a CNET article and Noah Shachtman’s somewhat breathless article in Wired based on a posting on the Federation of American Scientists Secrecy News blog; that, in turn, is based on a paper, “Sample Overview: Al-Qaida-Like Mobile Discussions and Potential Creative Uses.” (You can find it currently at the FAS site; I’m not going to link it because it’s marked “for official use only” and, dammit, I don’t want to encourage them.)
In communications security and communications intelligence — really two sides of the same coin — we have a pair of problems.
The people on our side, technically called white hats, want to be able to communicate among themselves without letting the black hats on the other side know what they are saying; that’s communications security. At the same time, they would like to know what the black hats are saying, and ideally without letting the black hats know we’re listening. (If the black hats know we’re listening, they are going to change the way they communicate; this is why “sources and methods” are so important, and why people like me get cranky about “for official use only” documents leaked to open web sites.)
The paper asks the question: what use could terrorists make of new technologies like Twitter and GPS cell phones? This kind of exercise, commonly called a red team, goes on all the time, often just as a thought exercise. The conclusion? Bad guys can use cell phones and Twitter too.
I know. Amazing, isn’t it?
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Charlie Martin is a Colorado computer scientist and freelance writer. He holds an MS in Computer Science from Duke University, where he spent six years with the National Biomedical Simulation Resource, Duke University Medical Center. Find him at http://chasrmartin.com, and on his blog at http://explorations.chasrmartin.com.
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10 Comments
1. Kevin:Every form of communication is ALSO used to feed the enemy a lot of misinformation.
Oct 31, 2008 - 4:38 am 2. Andrew Ian Dodge:If we were paranoid about terrorists using it we would only use cans & string between houses. Expect any technological development to be abused in the wrong hands…its a given.
Oct 31, 2008 - 6:40 am 3. Jor the plumber:A really good scanner can get your phone conversation. If your phone is coldless and a cell phone.
Oct 31, 2008 - 5:49 pm 4. Harry I Brown:Why can’t we flood the enemy with phony twitter (disinformation). Then they will have a hard time separating the good stuff from the junk.
Oct 31, 2008 - 6:15 pm 5. Joshua:I have been watching many documentaries on The Military Channel about how brilliantly the British duped the Nazi’s in WW2. Even as late as D-Day+30, Hitler was still not convinced that the Normandy operation was not a deception to lure his defenses away from the real invasion sites at Pas-de-Calais and/or Norway (Operation “Fortitude”).
Stalin almost never believed the accurate information that the British and Americans were feeding him until we started transmitting it to him through his spy network in Europe. Then he believed it.
I assume we are doing similar things with our present enemies, so why worry so much about “twitter”?
#4: Or better yet, use fake twitter to lead the enemy to walk into an ambush we set up for them.
Oct 31, 2008 - 7:33 pm 6. fred:What is disturbing is not the potential use of this technology to the enemy. Eventually he’s going to adapt too. That is the nature of warfare. The trick is to be more adaptive and innovative than the enemy is. So, you are always striving to get up the curve faster than he is. That’s dependent upon your resources and brain power.
What is disturbing is the irreverent and flip attitude of the Wired people. They just don’t “get it.” As with so many in the West since the beginning of the contemporary recrudescence of Islamic jihad when the Soviets kick-started the PLO and helped the Muslim Brotherhood, there is a disturbing lack of appreciation of the determination and fanaticism of the revival of Muhammad’s project, now 1,400 years extant.
Those who do not respect their enemies do not respect themselves.
Oct 31, 2008 - 7:42 pm 7. jvon:Wired is half right. The government’s knee-jerk reaction to new technology is to try to regulate it because it might pose a security threat. As far as they attempt to do that, they will be ridiculed, and rightly so.
However, I’m glad people inside the military are considering the uses of Twitter and other similar services. If they are not being used already, they will be.
Nov 1, 2008 - 10:09 am 8. Mike:I’m quite sure the Wired people “get it.” This is a typical OTT knee-jerk reaction by the government. Not including any sort of operational details in open source communications is common sense. No dates, times, locations etc etc.
Terrorists can and will use all forms of media/com. They could pass messages through the comments section of pajamasmedia. Shall we close down pajamasmedia?
Sorry, but that’s just the price you pay for living in a free and open society. It’s a risk that we will just have to deal with. Do you think the Soviets didn’t use The Washington Post to pass info?
Of course we could turn everything in 1984, but then we’d be doing the terrorists work for them. No thanks.
Nov 1, 2008 - 6:58 pm 9. ron c:In WW2 the slogan ws “A slip of the lip can sink a ship”, so the world has not changed.
We in the world need to remind ourselves that a WAR is going on.
Nov 2, 2008 - 12:19 pm 10. Pajamas Media » Obama’s Inevitable Crackberry Withdrawal:[...] not just the content of his emails that can be revealing: as I discussed in my recent article about the security risks of using Twitter, there is another kind of intelligence gathering, called traffic analysis, in which the mere fact [...]
Nov 17, 2008 - 1:20 am