christiefan915
Catalyst
Paging Billy. Remember how you said I was a traitor and should be shot for criticizing Snowden?
"The Islamic State’s claim of responsibility for the Paris attacks that killed 129 people — including one American college
student — has the potential to dramatically alter U.S. intelligence assessments of the group’s capabilities to carry off
well-orchestrated, mass casualty attacks.
At the same time, the attacks underscore the mounting difficulties U.S. and Western intelligence agencies are having
in tracking the terror group, resulting in repeated warnings that their efforts to conduct surveillance of Islamic State
suspects were “going dark.”
Over the past year, current and former intelligence officials tell Yahoo News, IS terror suspects have moved to
increasingly sophisticated methods of encrypted communications, using new software such as Tor, that intelligence
agencies are having difficulty penetrating — a switch that some officials say was accelerated by the disclosures of
former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The result played out in deadly fashion in Paris: At least eight terrorists, armed with heavy weaponry and suicide vests,
and most likely aided by a support network, plotted and executed a highly elaborate mass casualty attack on
multiple targets without the French or any other Western intelligence agency having a clue.
But what has alarmed U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials is that their ability to thwart such attacks
has been made increasingly difficult because of their inability to track IS communications.
Just three weeks ago, Nick Rasmussen, the current director of the NCTC, told a congressional committee that
terrorist actors were displaying an increasing ability to communicate “outside our reach” and that the difficulty
in tracking “particular terrorist plots is increasing over time.”
Rasmussen, echoing the view of multiple U.S. intelligence officials, blamed the problem in part on “the exposure of
intelligence collection techniques” — a clear reference to the tens of thousands of internal National Security Agency
documents leaked by Snowden.
“There’s no doubt that the disclosures overall created a situation in which we lost coverage of terrorists,” Olsen said
at a Yahoo News sponsored conference, Digital Democracy, this week, on the day before the Paris attacks. “Specifically,
we saw people that we were targeting with NSA surveillance stop using communications at all. We saw them go to different
service providers. We saw them go to uses of encryption — different ways they were reacting to what they were seeing.
It shouldn’t be any surprise — these guys are sophisticated . ... They’re reading the newspapers and seeing what we can do.”
In the months after the Snowden disclosures, U.S. officials tell Yahoo News, some terror suspects — including those
associated with IS in Iraq and Syria — were even overheard by U.S. intelligence making comments along the lines of
“let’s not use that anymore,” one former official said.
http://news.yahoo.com/paris-attacks...amic-state-may-be--going-dark-203103709.html#
"The Islamic State’s claim of responsibility for the Paris attacks that killed 129 people — including one American college
student — has the potential to dramatically alter U.S. intelligence assessments of the group’s capabilities to carry off
well-orchestrated, mass casualty attacks.
At the same time, the attacks underscore the mounting difficulties U.S. and Western intelligence agencies are having
in tracking the terror group, resulting in repeated warnings that their efforts to conduct surveillance of Islamic State
suspects were “going dark.”
Over the past year, current and former intelligence officials tell Yahoo News, IS terror suspects have moved to
increasingly sophisticated methods of encrypted communications, using new software such as Tor, that intelligence
agencies are having difficulty penetrating — a switch that some officials say was accelerated by the disclosures of
former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The result played out in deadly fashion in Paris: At least eight terrorists, armed with heavy weaponry and suicide vests,
and most likely aided by a support network, plotted and executed a highly elaborate mass casualty attack on
multiple targets without the French or any other Western intelligence agency having a clue.
But what has alarmed U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials is that their ability to thwart such attacks
has been made increasingly difficult because of their inability to track IS communications.
Just three weeks ago, Nick Rasmussen, the current director of the NCTC, told a congressional committee that
terrorist actors were displaying an increasing ability to communicate “outside our reach” and that the difficulty
in tracking “particular terrorist plots is increasing over time.”
Rasmussen, echoing the view of multiple U.S. intelligence officials, blamed the problem in part on “the exposure of
intelligence collection techniques” — a clear reference to the tens of thousands of internal National Security Agency
documents leaked by Snowden.
“There’s no doubt that the disclosures overall created a situation in which we lost coverage of terrorists,” Olsen said
at a Yahoo News sponsored conference, Digital Democracy, this week, on the day before the Paris attacks. “Specifically,
we saw people that we were targeting with NSA surveillance stop using communications at all. We saw them go to different
service providers. We saw them go to uses of encryption — different ways they were reacting to what they were seeing.
It shouldn’t be any surprise — these guys are sophisticated . ... They’re reading the newspapers and seeing what we can do.”
In the months after the Snowden disclosures, U.S. officials tell Yahoo News, some terror suspects — including those
associated with IS in Iraq and Syria — were even overheard by U.S. intelligence making comments along the lines of
“let’s not use that anymore,” one former official said.
http://news.yahoo.com/paris-attacks...amic-state-may-be--going-dark-203103709.html#
