The events following the ghastly terror
attacks in Paris and Beirut last week have
followed a tragically predictable formula.
Once again, acts of senseless violence have
left scores of innocents dead and millions
around the world in mourning. Once again,
we have watched these horrors unfold in real
time on TV and social media, zigzagging
through the maze of misinformation, anxiety
and anger.
And once again, Western government officials
are shamelessly exploiting tragedy to justify
more surveillance, more reactionary military
interventions and more draconian security
policies at home. Their pitch is the same as
it was after the last major attack, and the
one before that , and as far back as anyone
can remember: Give us just a little more
power — surrender a few more civil liberties
and a bit more privacy — and next time we
will truly keep you safe.
Authorities wasted no time, blaming the
attacks on the rise of sophisticated
encryption even while admitting they have no
evidence that encryption was actually used.
On Monday morning, CIA director John
Brennan told reporters that the Paris attacks
should serve as a "wake-up call" about the
need to give the government access to
encrypted communications, even though he
admitted there was no evidence that
encryption prevented authorities from
detecting the plot. The New York Times
published, and later removed from their
website, an article citing unnamed European
officials similarly stating that those
responsible for the Paris attacks “are believed
to have communicated using encryption
technology,” but that it is still “not clear
whether the encryption was part of widely
used communications tools, like WhatsApp …
or something more elaborate.” On Tuesday, a
Times headline declared “Encrypted
Messaging Apps Face New Scrutiny Over
Possible Role in Paris Attacks,” despite the
article’s very first sentence stating: “American
and French officials say there is still no
definitive evidence to back up their
presumption that the terrorists … used new,
difficult-to-crack encryption technologies to
organize the plot.”
Of course, the point of all this speculation
isn’t to determine how the terrorists actually
planned the highly coordinated attacks, but
rather to drum up fear by demonizing the
widespread use of strong encryption, which
has grown in popularity since National
Security Agency whistleblower Edward
Snowden’s surveillance revelations.
Until recently, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and other U.S. agencies were
on the offensive, demanding backdoors into
end-to-end encrypted messaging apps such
as Signal and WhatsApp, which by design
send private messages that even the
companies themselves can’t read — and thus
can’t surrender to law enforcement. Security
experts and Silicon Valley pushed back,
noting that creating backdoors would open
vulnerabilities that any well-resourced
adversary — be they Russian cybercriminals
or Chinese government hackers — could find
and exploit, making everyday Internet usage
much more dangerous as a result. The
consensus was so overwhelming that even
President Barack Obama backed down,
conceding that his administration wouldn’t be
seeking encryption backdoors.
The attacks in Paris have now reinvigorated
these demands. But what few details we
know about the attacks shed doubt on how
useful backdoors would have been.
A report from Le Monde early this morning
suggests that the terrorists were not
encrypting their communications or data
while planning the attack; authorities say
they were able to access data on a cellphone
recovered from one of the suspects —
including the location of a safe house that
was raided on Wednesday, a map of the
concert hall where terrorists massacred 89
people and an unencrypted text message
saying “We’re off; we’re starting.” According
to intelligence and law enforcement officials,
three of the attackers lived in the same
district in Brussels, meaning that — assuming
they aren't stupid — they would have
communicated in person or by courier rather
than electronically. If the group had been in
contact with foreign members of ISIL, as
some early reports suggested, the ability to
read encrypted communications would also
be secondary: Determining their associations
and movements would only require access to
their metadata — the communications
records that intelligence agencies already
collect in bulk — not the encrypted messages’
contents.
It speaks volumes that the United States, the
United Kingdom and France all now have
systems for collecting massive troves of
metadata, yet none of them were able to
disrupt these attacks. Indeed, newly leaked
documents published yesterday by The
Intercept show that the U.S. mass
surveillance programs have no record of
preventing major attacks on the scale of
those that occurred in Paris.
Nevertheless, these same clamors for more
surveillance powers re-emerge after every
terrorist attack. And every time, we give
governments the powers they want, only to
have them come back for more when the
next attack occurs. Following the Charlie
Hebdo attacks in January, the French
Parliament overwhelmingly passed one of the
most sweeping surveillance laws in the
Western world, giving its security services
access to citizens’ data without judicial
approval. Clearly, this did little to prevent or
even anticipate the attacks in Paris.
Given the repeated failure of Western security
agencies to detect threats, despite all the
surveillance tools they’ve been handed, are
we now seriously expected to believe that
encryption backdoors will stop these kinds of
attacks forever? Are we really so foolish to
uncritically accept that the true purpose of
mass surveillance is fighting terrorism, when
it has been proven time and again that no
amount of it is ever enough to keep us safe?
It’s little wonder that even the NSA privately
admits it suffers from having too much data,
not too little.
Terrorism is, among other things, a crime
against the mind. The terrorist’s goal is to
shock and traumatize us such that we
fundamentally cripple our society and
abandon our most cherished values. Fear is
the objective — violence is merely the vessel.
Governments can never keep us truly “safe”
from terrorism, because the safety they claim
to offer is a myth. We’ve been given the
illusion of safety because it’s simply
impossible to detect every threat everywhere
at all times. Yet with each new tragedy, the
price we pay in terms of civil liberties and
privacy to sustain this fantasy increases.
It’s only natural to be scared and angry in
light of horrifying and senseless violence. It’s
normal to feel compelled to do something,
anything — however rash or hasty it might
seem — to try and prevent these horrors from
happening again. But we must resist this
urge and recognize that terrorism makes us
to feel this way because it is, at least in the
Western world, a rare event. We are still
orders of magnitude more likely to be killed
by police, car crashes, falling furniture or
slippery bathroom floors than by terrorists.
Instead of trying to prevent every bad thing
from ever occurring, we can be resilient. We
can prepare for the worst and respond to
violence by offering humanitarian aid,
solidarity and support instead of being
consumed by fear. And if we must be afraid,
we should fear those in power who claim they
can keep us safe by waging wars, eroding
our liberties and crippling our ability to have
control over our private lives.
SHARE THIS:
RELATED NEWS
PLACES
Paris
TOPICS
Surveillance, Terrorism
GET EMAIL UPDATES FROM
AL JAZEERA AMERICA
Sign up for our weekly newsletter
EDITOR'S PICKS
Syria's Assad could benefit
most from renewed global push
against ISIL
Blood gold: From conflict zones
in Colombia to jewelry stores in
the US
OPINION: Beware a Pyrrhic
victory over ISIL
Minnesota probes death of
black man at hands of
Minneapolis police
Afghan refugees in Pakistan
face harassment, discrimination,
HRW says
Tweets by @zenalbatross
OPINION: Britain has declared war on Internet
security
OPINION: Stop malvertising
OPINION: The poisonous paranoia of ‘see
something, say something’
OPINIONS
Governments exploit Paris attacks to push
for more power
by Joshua Kopstein
Kill James Bond
by Malcolm Harris
US leaders cave to popular fear on Syrian
refugees
by Lauren Carasik
A French war on terror?
by Arthur Goldhammer
Don’t subject refugees to a religious test
by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
START THE CONVERSATION
Write a comment
Justin Brochure
It's a classic strategy. You create a
problem and then tell people you can
fix the problem by doing this, this
and this. I do not blame governments
for wanting absolute power over
there people. I blame people for not
over throwing these governments.
The people are more interested in
televisions the they are there own
rights.
Deborah Polan
I think this will just turn us into
police states. NYC already plans to
put in place 500 more officers just
for the purpose of terrorism. So are
these guys going to walk around
racial profiling people? That's not
how you combat terrorism. You stay
out of other people's countries, no
occupying, no taking their resources,
use UN Peacekeeper to take care of
any issues. We don't need more
police, what we need is better foreign
policy and a better domestic
reporting system for suspicious
activity.
MrJamesIkanov .
I haven't even read the article yet
and I already agree with the
headline. It's scary. If things keep
going like this, we either get killed by
terrorists, or we get dragged off to
an anti-terror gulag for buying too
much bleach at once. Maybe both.
Wolf Ironsmit
“Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear
Itself”: FDR
And fear is the tool of terrorists and
totalitarian governments.
RedHeart64 .
Government could be a force for
good, but as long as it serves the
interests of the 1% (who profit most
from the suppression and repression
of the 99%) they will be trying to
convince the American populace that
the problem is those horrible
Others... the Muslims, the dread
Socialists, the horrific Chinese...
anything but those who are the REAL
source of misery for most of this
world.
It serves their interests in making the
government the big goon to be
feared and giving that goon more
and more power in the lives of the
99% - while misdirecting attention to
Othered groups. All of the things we
struggle against tie together... and
behind them all is a tiny few who
profit from every hateful word
directed at Muslims, every lie told
about different economic systems,
and suppression of knowledge from
the majority.
Michael Stephens
You forgot to mention the largest
terrorist attack in the last month -
the killing of over 200 Russians by
ISIS. How come?
RedHeart64 .
I suspect because Russia is one of
the horrible Others, just as
Muslims are.
It serves their interests to make
people think the attacks are
always directed at them (or
someone not really Othered) -
because it causes fear and fear is
an effective manipulation tool.
contrarianp
Everyone already knows that
Russia is a surveillance state. UK,
US and France, not so much.
Harry Steinrock
terrorism is like a cancer, sometime
you just cut it out, but will it be the
death of the human race?
RedHeart64 .
Better yet to starve it off...
terrorism is the end result of
fundamentalist thinking (even if
it's not religious fundamentalism)
and fundamentalism is the result
when ordinary people realize the
system doesn't work for them. (I
think it could be argued that the
"system" actually fights AGAINST
the ordinary people.)
Deborah Polan
It would be better to find out why
it's there to begin with.
Uneducated people with no jobs
misinterpreting the Koran because
they haven't read it as most are
illiterate. So, it would be better if
we had only UN forces in the
Middle East, aided with literacy,
have UN forces aid with a system
of govt that provides jobs, instead
of just bombing civilians. Civilians
complained this week as they
were bombed by the Us, France,
Russia and then France again...in
the same spot! Einstein said,
"Insanity is doing the same thing
over and over again and expecting
a different result." And something
doesn't sound right. Why the
same spot???
Amy Anderson
You sow the wind, you reap the
whirlwind. We, Western Europe
(France, England, Germany), and
Russia have been sowing the wind
since the end of WWII. We are now
reaping the whirlwind. Get out of
their countries and let them live or
die by their own hands. But that
would not suit the agendas of the
Corporatists and Banksters, would
it?
Mike Breeden
You are correct, only the complete
elimination of Islam will make the
world safer!
Michael Stephens
You would have made a wonderful
NAZI with that blanket final
solution.;
Damon Kaiser
Now now, Godwin's Law and
all. A better similarity would be
"Crusader"
Lewis Balentine
It is not exploitation. It is becoming
a matter of survival.
Visit Al Jazeera English
OPINION
DAVID RAMOS / GETTY IMAGES
Governments can never
keep us truly ‘safe’ from
terrorism, because the
safety they claim to offer is
a myth.
“
”
Joshua Kopstein is a journalist and researcher
from New York City focused on contemporary
themes of surveillance, technology, privacy and
power. He is the author of Lawful Intercept , a
semi-regular newsletter of dystopian non-fiction.
attacks in Paris and Beirut last week have
followed a tragically predictable formula.
Once again, acts of senseless violence have
left scores of innocents dead and millions
around the world in mourning. Once again,
we have watched these horrors unfold in real
time on TV and social media, zigzagging
through the maze of misinformation, anxiety
and anger.
And once again, Western government officials
are shamelessly exploiting tragedy to justify
more surveillance, more reactionary military
interventions and more draconian security
policies at home. Their pitch is the same as
it was after the last major attack, and the
one before that , and as far back as anyone
can remember: Give us just a little more
power — surrender a few more civil liberties
and a bit more privacy — and next time we
will truly keep you safe.
Authorities wasted no time, blaming the
attacks on the rise of sophisticated
encryption even while admitting they have no
evidence that encryption was actually used.
On Monday morning, CIA director John
Brennan told reporters that the Paris attacks
should serve as a "wake-up call" about the
need to give the government access to
encrypted communications, even though he
admitted there was no evidence that
encryption prevented authorities from
detecting the plot. The New York Times
published, and later removed from their
website, an article citing unnamed European
officials similarly stating that those
responsible for the Paris attacks “are believed
to have communicated using encryption
technology,” but that it is still “not clear
whether the encryption was part of widely
used communications tools, like WhatsApp …
or something more elaborate.” On Tuesday, a
Times headline declared “Encrypted
Messaging Apps Face New Scrutiny Over
Possible Role in Paris Attacks,” despite the
article’s very first sentence stating: “American
and French officials say there is still no
definitive evidence to back up their
presumption that the terrorists … used new,
difficult-to-crack encryption technologies to
organize the plot.”
Of course, the point of all this speculation
isn’t to determine how the terrorists actually
planned the highly coordinated attacks, but
rather to drum up fear by demonizing the
widespread use of strong encryption, which
has grown in popularity since National
Security Agency whistleblower Edward
Snowden’s surveillance revelations.
Until recently, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and other U.S. agencies were
on the offensive, demanding backdoors into
end-to-end encrypted messaging apps such
as Signal and WhatsApp, which by design
send private messages that even the
companies themselves can’t read — and thus
can’t surrender to law enforcement. Security
experts and Silicon Valley pushed back,
noting that creating backdoors would open
vulnerabilities that any well-resourced
adversary — be they Russian cybercriminals
or Chinese government hackers — could find
and exploit, making everyday Internet usage
much more dangerous as a result. The
consensus was so overwhelming that even
President Barack Obama backed down,
conceding that his administration wouldn’t be
seeking encryption backdoors.
The attacks in Paris have now reinvigorated
these demands. But what few details we
know about the attacks shed doubt on how
useful backdoors would have been.
A report from Le Monde early this morning
suggests that the terrorists were not
encrypting their communications or data
while planning the attack; authorities say
they were able to access data on a cellphone
recovered from one of the suspects —
including the location of a safe house that
was raided on Wednesday, a map of the
concert hall where terrorists massacred 89
people and an unencrypted text message
saying “We’re off; we’re starting.” According
to intelligence and law enforcement officials,
three of the attackers lived in the same
district in Brussels, meaning that — assuming
they aren't stupid — they would have
communicated in person or by courier rather
than electronically. If the group had been in
contact with foreign members of ISIL, as
some early reports suggested, the ability to
read encrypted communications would also
be secondary: Determining their associations
and movements would only require access to
their metadata — the communications
records that intelligence agencies already
collect in bulk — not the encrypted messages’
contents.
It speaks volumes that the United States, the
United Kingdom and France all now have
systems for collecting massive troves of
metadata, yet none of them were able to
disrupt these attacks. Indeed, newly leaked
documents published yesterday by The
Intercept show that the U.S. mass
surveillance programs have no record of
preventing major attacks on the scale of
those that occurred in Paris.
Nevertheless, these same clamors for more
surveillance powers re-emerge after every
terrorist attack. And every time, we give
governments the powers they want, only to
have them come back for more when the
next attack occurs. Following the Charlie
Hebdo attacks in January, the French
Parliament overwhelmingly passed one of the
most sweeping surveillance laws in the
Western world, giving its security services
access to citizens’ data without judicial
approval. Clearly, this did little to prevent or
even anticipate the attacks in Paris.
Given the repeated failure of Western security
agencies to detect threats, despite all the
surveillance tools they’ve been handed, are
we now seriously expected to believe that
encryption backdoors will stop these kinds of
attacks forever? Are we really so foolish to
uncritically accept that the true purpose of
mass surveillance is fighting terrorism, when
it has been proven time and again that no
amount of it is ever enough to keep us safe?
It’s little wonder that even the NSA privately
admits it suffers from having too much data,
not too little.
Terrorism is, among other things, a crime
against the mind. The terrorist’s goal is to
shock and traumatize us such that we
fundamentally cripple our society and
abandon our most cherished values. Fear is
the objective — violence is merely the vessel.
Governments can never keep us truly “safe”
from terrorism, because the safety they claim
to offer is a myth. We’ve been given the
illusion of safety because it’s simply
impossible to detect every threat everywhere
at all times. Yet with each new tragedy, the
price we pay in terms of civil liberties and
privacy to sustain this fantasy increases.
It’s only natural to be scared and angry in
light of horrifying and senseless violence. It’s
normal to feel compelled to do something,
anything — however rash or hasty it might
seem — to try and prevent these horrors from
happening again. But we must resist this
urge and recognize that terrorism makes us
to feel this way because it is, at least in the
Western world, a rare event. We are still
orders of magnitude more likely to be killed
by police, car crashes, falling furniture or
slippery bathroom floors than by terrorists.
Instead of trying to prevent every bad thing
from ever occurring, we can be resilient. We
can prepare for the worst and respond to
violence by offering humanitarian aid,
solidarity and support instead of being
consumed by fear. And if we must be afraid,
we should fear those in power who claim they
can keep us safe by waging wars, eroding
our liberties and crippling our ability to have
control over our private lives.
SHARE THIS:
RELATED NEWS
PLACES
Paris
TOPICS
Surveillance, Terrorism
GET EMAIL UPDATES FROM
AL JAZEERA AMERICA
Sign up for our weekly newsletter
EDITOR'S PICKS
Syria's Assad could benefit
most from renewed global push
against ISIL
Blood gold: From conflict zones
in Colombia to jewelry stores in
the US
OPINION: Beware a Pyrrhic
victory over ISIL
Minnesota probes death of
black man at hands of
Minneapolis police
Afghan refugees in Pakistan
face harassment, discrimination,
HRW says
Tweets by @zenalbatross
OPINION: Britain has declared war on Internet
security
OPINION: Stop malvertising
OPINION: The poisonous paranoia of ‘see
something, say something’
OPINIONS
Governments exploit Paris attacks to push
for more power
by Joshua Kopstein
Kill James Bond
by Malcolm Harris
US leaders cave to popular fear on Syrian
refugees
by Lauren Carasik
A French war on terror?
by Arthur Goldhammer
Don’t subject refugees to a religious test
by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
START THE CONVERSATION
Write a comment
Justin Brochure
It's a classic strategy. You create a
problem and then tell people you can
fix the problem by doing this, this
and this. I do not blame governments
for wanting absolute power over
there people. I blame people for not
over throwing these governments.
The people are more interested in
televisions the they are there own
rights.
Deborah Polan
I think this will just turn us into
police states. NYC already plans to
put in place 500 more officers just
for the purpose of terrorism. So are
these guys going to walk around
racial profiling people? That's not
how you combat terrorism. You stay
out of other people's countries, no
occupying, no taking their resources,
use UN Peacekeeper to take care of
any issues. We don't need more
police, what we need is better foreign
policy and a better domestic
reporting system for suspicious
activity.
MrJamesIkanov .
I haven't even read the article yet
and I already agree with the
headline. It's scary. If things keep
going like this, we either get killed by
terrorists, or we get dragged off to
an anti-terror gulag for buying too
much bleach at once. Maybe both.
Wolf Ironsmit
“Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear
Itself”: FDR
And fear is the tool of terrorists and
totalitarian governments.
RedHeart64 .
Government could be a force for
good, but as long as it serves the
interests of the 1% (who profit most
from the suppression and repression
of the 99%) they will be trying to
convince the American populace that
the problem is those horrible
Others... the Muslims, the dread
Socialists, the horrific Chinese...
anything but those who are the REAL
source of misery for most of this
world.
It serves their interests in making the
government the big goon to be
feared and giving that goon more
and more power in the lives of the
99% - while misdirecting attention to
Othered groups. All of the things we
struggle against tie together... and
behind them all is a tiny few who
profit from every hateful word
directed at Muslims, every lie told
about different economic systems,
and suppression of knowledge from
the majority.
Michael Stephens
You forgot to mention the largest
terrorist attack in the last month -
the killing of over 200 Russians by
ISIS. How come?
RedHeart64 .
I suspect because Russia is one of
the horrible Others, just as
Muslims are.
It serves their interests to make
people think the attacks are
always directed at them (or
someone not really Othered) -
because it causes fear and fear is
an effective manipulation tool.
contrarianp
Everyone already knows that
Russia is a surveillance state. UK,
US and France, not so much.
Harry Steinrock
terrorism is like a cancer, sometime
you just cut it out, but will it be the
death of the human race?
RedHeart64 .
Better yet to starve it off...
terrorism is the end result of
fundamentalist thinking (even if
it's not religious fundamentalism)
and fundamentalism is the result
when ordinary people realize the
system doesn't work for them. (I
think it could be argued that the
"system" actually fights AGAINST
the ordinary people.)
Deborah Polan
It would be better to find out why
it's there to begin with.
Uneducated people with no jobs
misinterpreting the Koran because
they haven't read it as most are
illiterate. So, it would be better if
we had only UN forces in the
Middle East, aided with literacy,
have UN forces aid with a system
of govt that provides jobs, instead
of just bombing civilians. Civilians
complained this week as they
were bombed by the Us, France,
Russia and then France again...in
the same spot! Einstein said,
"Insanity is doing the same thing
over and over again and expecting
a different result." And something
doesn't sound right. Why the
same spot???
Amy Anderson
You sow the wind, you reap the
whirlwind. We, Western Europe
(France, England, Germany), and
Russia have been sowing the wind
since the end of WWII. We are now
reaping the whirlwind. Get out of
their countries and let them live or
die by their own hands. But that
would not suit the agendas of the
Corporatists and Banksters, would
it?
Mike Breeden
You are correct, only the complete
elimination of Islam will make the
world safer!
Michael Stephens
You would have made a wonderful
NAZI with that blanket final
solution.;
Damon Kaiser
Now now, Godwin's Law and
all. A better similarity would be
"Crusader"
Lewis Balentine
It is not exploitation. It is becoming
a matter of survival.
Visit Al Jazeera English
OPINION
DAVID RAMOS / GETTY IMAGES
Governments can never
keep us truly ‘safe’ from
terrorism, because the
safety they claim to offer is
a myth.
“
”
Joshua Kopstein is a journalist and researcher
from New York City focused on contemporary
themes of surveillance, technology, privacy and
power. He is the author of Lawful Intercept , a
semi-regular newsletter of dystopian non-fiction.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment