Snowden Casts Doubt On ISIS Encryption Video

Snowden Casts Doubt On ISIS Encryption Video

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ISIS likes to tout itself as extremely technologically proficient. The organisation releases apps, instructions on online behaviour, and has recently released a video showing it used an encryption app in order to carry out the Paris terrorist attacks. The latter, however, could be a somewhat overblown claim, if Edward Snowden is to be believed.

Some hours after ISIS released the video, Snowden – former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who in 2013 revealed details of mass surveillance operations carried out by, among others, his former employer, and released a veritable treasure trove of documents to a select group of journalists – responded through Twitter with some pretty damning evidence.

The video in question contains, as is usual with ISIS videos, footage of beheadings as well as
of the gunmen who killed more than 100 revellers in Paris in November. It also snowden-on-isisincluded a segment portraying the group’s use of encryption to execute the attacks, particularly PGP encryption. Snowden, who has established himself as an outspoken advocate for encryption, said in his tweet that the code in the video is too short to be a valid instance of PGP encryption.

Further, the encryption key identification code shown in the video, 1548OH76, would be unusable and invalid due to the O and H characters in it. On top of that, the timestamp of the message showed it was decrypted three days after the attack, raising more suspicious as to the validity of ISIS’ claim.

PGP – which stands for Pretty Good Privacy – is an established and popular method of encryption. Besides being used for encoding messages, it also serve to authenticate private email, texts, and other communication. Snowden himself used PGP when he set up meetings with journalists Glenn Greenwald and others to release the data in his possession.