United States of Spying

[Grumpy Gramps]

As much as I am for capturing the dude and putting him on trial...we are talking about a dude from a terrorist group they got on video beheading people, making propaganda vids beheading people...during a war...in Syria. Somehow I'm ok with this evaporation.

Hmm, just because someone is a monster doesn't mean that we have to become the same type of monsters, too imo. Or else the monsters pull us down to their own level and we'd lose the "moral high ground"/right to eventually judge and evaporate them.

[wagyl]

Get with the program, Gramps! We are the internet! We are required to be a baying mob of vigilantes!

[Russell]

Get with the program, Gramps! We are the internet! We are required to be a baying mob of vigilantes!

Taking the moral high ground, huh?

Well, it is preferable to have that vermin face justice, but that requires him to be captured alive. You want to risk soldiers' lives for that? Or are you personally gonna deliver him to the courts?!?

[wagyl]

Whatever, I'm not going to say that I'm looking forward to seeking a video of an execution, which is what you were saying.

Now that is dragging yourself down to his level. I think you are a better person than that.

[Wage Slave]

Yeah, fair enough Wags. It's not so much that I am looking forward to seeing the video. It's more that it would represent a kind of poetic justice for the obscene videos that he made and his organisation circulated. I certainly didn't want to see them but they were pretty much in our faces. Of course, the more commercially minded of the media organisations bear some of the blame but it was news and it was designed to be news, capture headlines and be seen very widely.

I just can't raise any moral hackles for this young man or Daesh. I'll grant I probably should, but I'm sorry I just can't.

[wagyl]

I do not see an easy solution, but I would like to maintain some humanity for myself. Some might say I do not have that luxury.

I do, however, think that brutality in reprisal only increases the radicalisation in others. A real nine-headed hydra.

[JAVGOD]

The next holocaust will be worldwide. Except wherever Nobile Energy execs live.

[kurogane]

.
I do, however, think that brutality in reprisal only increases the radicalisation in others. A real nine-headed hydra.

Hard to disagree with that, but allowing that live capture was unlikely, and that the method used wasn't particularly brutal just decisive, it's great to hear he's dead, glad to hear he went out like the Big Poof he was in life, no need to enjoy the method used, or even the news itself. It's not like there's a shortage of these whackjobs, or their pandering handlers , and the media that celebrates them with a hand over their eyes in mock horror as they gleefully watch through their open fingers should be castigated most vigorously for being the scalliwags and strumpets they are.

Still, "he sort of just evaporated".............that is pretty F'in cool. Reminds me of the army reserve when we shot melons and pumpkins with a .50 cal machine gun. Except those poor gourds didn't do anything to deserve that.

[Russell]

I am confused.

In July:

Jihadi John 'on the run in Syria after becoming terrified ISIS chiefs have no use for him and will subject him to same fate as his victims'

Now:

ISIS supporters claim he is alive and wounded, 'lying in hospital in Raqqa'

Anyway:

Raffaello Pantucci, director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute, said if confirmed, Emwazi's death would make little strategic difference and could create a 'martyr culture' around him.

'It's more a symbolic strike, he said. 'Tactically it's not really going to change anything for the group.'

But Charlie Winter, a British academic from the Quilliam Foundation which focuses on ISIS activities, said it could be a 'big blow'.

'Symbolically it's really important. Jihadi John... was someone who was a source of hubris, a sort of an aspirational figure for fighters in Islamic State,' he said.

'He was a key figure of defiance in the face of the international coalition, so if in fact he has been killed, this is going to be a big blow.'

However, one of Emwazi's former neighbours in London today said he should have been captured, interrogated and made to face trial rather than being killed.

James Beker, 47, who lives above the Emwazi family in West Kilburn, west London, said the ISIS killer would have had vital information that could have kept Britain safe from attack.

The father-of-three said: 'I feel sorry he has been killed in this way. They should have put him on trial and interrogated him for information.

'They might have got information that we need for the safety of our country and find out why did he do that.

'They said he was intelligent so how did he turn evil? He turned into not really a beast but a monster.'

[Samurai_Jerk]

Encryption wars heating up in wake of terror attacks

It took nearly two weeks for French officials to piece together how a team of nine terrorists planned the deadly Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 130. And during that time, intelligence officials filled the media vacuum with their own theories for what happened.

A Nov. 15 New York Times story (which was later silently pulled) said the attackers were “believed to have communicated using encryption technology, according to European officials who had been briefed on the investigation.” The following day, former CIA deputy director Michael Morell pointed to the secure communications tool — which jumbles messages so that they can be decoded only with a key — in connection with the attack. “We don’t know yet, but I think what we’re going to learn is that [the attackers] used these encryption apps, right?” he said on “CBS This Morning.” On Nov. 18, FBI Director James Comey reiterated his position that the bureau needs to access encrypted communications. Encryption, he said, permits “the needle [in the haystack] we’ve been searching the entire nation to find” to go “invisible.”

Although these comments may have been news to those searching for answers in the days following the attack, many encryption activists and experts felt as if they were experiencing déjà vu.

“In Internet years, this rhetoric is ancient at this point,” Nate Cardozo, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Yahoo News. “We’ve been hearing it since the mid-’90s.”

And, in the case of the Paris attacks, officials’ statements were also inaccurate. Aside from a few minor encrypted interactions, investigators found that the terrorists hatched their attack out in the open, booking online hotel reservations with their real names, exchanging Facebook messages and sending SMS texts on an unencrypted phone that police found discarded near one of the shooting sites.

But the issue is a long-standing one in the European and U.S. intelligence communities. Since the early ’90s, regulating encryption has been a contentious topic among technologists and government officials — a debate that is often renewed after major terrorist attacks. Government officials have insisted they need special access to encrypted networks to ensure terrorist communication does not slip by unnoticed. Technology companies, backed by activists and academics, have countered that doing so would irreparably compromise the security of our products and their economic viability.

[wagyl]

Aside from a few minor encrypted interactions, investigators found that the terrorists hatched their attack out in the open, booking online hotel reservations with their real names, exchanging Facebook messages and sending SMS texts on an unencrypted phone that police found discarded near one of the shooting sites.

Please please please make this a rationale for banning Faecesbook.