Paris Attacks Raise Privacy Debate Once More

Paris Attacks Raise Privacy Debate Once More

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Paz Shabtai

Following the Paris attacks, apparently planned under the noses of French and Belgian authorities, one possibility is that Islamic State militants have found ways around the Western Surveillance as it is not yet clear how the attackers of multiple attacks managed to communicate with each other.

The Islamic State has built a tech-savvy division of fighters who issue tutorials to sympathizers about the most secure and least expensive ways of communicating, and there are also low-tec ways of communicating a message: Pen and paper, for example. There are, however, encrypted commercial or gaming platforms known to be used by criminals and terrorists to communicate.

Islamic State is one of the most technologically oriented extremist groups. Its advice to followers includes an eight-minute video released last year in Arabic that discusses the surveillance capabilities of hostile governments and how phones can be tracked.

In January, an IS follower known online as al-Khabir al-Taqni, claiming to be a “technical expert”, published a list of what he determined to be the safest encrypted communications systems available. Soon after the list was published, Islamic State started moving official communications from Twitter to Telegram Messenger, which received the second-highest safety rating from the Islamic State technical team. The orgzniation has also urged its followers to make use of the app’s capability to host encrypted group chats.

IS has been using the app as a means of distributing its propaganda material since October, when Telegram introduced a feature letting users broadcast messages to an unlimited number of subscribers.

The app’s creators have previously acknowledged that terrorists use the app and said that privacy takes precedent over preventing terrorism.

These encrypted apps are the subject of a debate that hits center stage whenever an attack is suspected to have been operated using them. European governments have pushed companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter for some time now to build a “back door” for government agencies to have access to the companies’ encryption tool. This, however, raises the question of whether or not, should governments be granted access, users will continue to trust these internet platforms.

“Ultimately, ISIS will find a way to communicate with its cells,” Pavel Durov, Telegram’s founder, said in September, “and if any means doesn’t feel secure to them, they’ll [find something else]. We shouldn’t feel guilty about it. We’re still doing the right thing, protecting our users’ privacy.”

Suspecting that the use of the Telegram app has helped the terrorists’ plan to knock down the Russian plane over the Sinai penninsula, Russian gvoernment officials have called to ban the app, causing Durov to repond on Russian social network: “I propose we ban words, There is information that terrorists use them to communicate.”