After Paris and San Bernadino, FBI director James Comey has stepped up his “We’re Going Dark” roadshow, telling everyone who will listen how encryption is making it impossible to stop terrorists. In a Washington Post op-ed, Jihadists are making their plans public. Why hasn’t the FBI caught on?, Rita Katz discloses an inconvenient truth: the vast majority of Jihadist communications are carried out in the clear on social media. Sadly—and dangerously—the FBI prefers to ignore this fact.
In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Comey said that Elton Simpson, the Garland, Texas shooter had exchanged 109 encrypted messages with an overseas terrorist. The implication was that if only the FBI had their much sought after backdoor, they would have been able to discover the plot and prevent the attack. One of Katz’s inconvenient facts is that those 109 messages were not discovered until after the attack so they could have played no part in preventing it. Here’s another: Elton Simpson was known to the FBI and used Twitter to openly follow and communicate with known terrorists.
One of those terrorists, Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan, tweeted the incitement for the attack. Simpson retweeted the message and asked Hassan to direct message him. All of this was in the open, no encryption involved.
It gets better. Katz’s organization, the SITE Intelligence Group, discovered this communication and reported it to the FBI one week before the attack took place. And yet it’s Apple’s, Google’s, and Edward Snowden’s fault that innocent citizens are at risk.
As we’ve recently learned after San Bernadino, the U.S. Government has rules prohibiting its agents from using public social media sites to gather intelligence. Katz says that “the FBI is reluctant to recognize open-source as an important — arguably the most important — tool to track jihadists online.”
Let’s review. The intelligence community has no trouble snooping on our most private communications and demanding that we weaken encryption so that they can read our sensitive messages but they’re reluctant to use public, unencrypted information that is easily available to them, or anyone else, without the need for snooping. As the Garland incident—Comey’s own example—shows, having access to the perpetrator’s encryption key would have made no difference but the unencrypted, publicly viewable information that would have made a difference was ignored even after it was pointed out to the FBI.