There is lot of discussion in the media right now about about terrorist videos being published on the likes of YouTube and FaceBook, something must be done… Even the Daily Telegraph joined in last Saturday 25th March 2017.
Why nothing will be done about terrorist videos
But NOTHING is going to happen, because this material is actually being used to track and profile terrorists:
Source Camera Identification Using Footprints from Lens Aberration
https://www.eee.hku.hk/optima/pub/conference/0601_EIf.pdfAutomatic source camera identification using the intrinsic lens radial distortion
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19529575Digital Photos Give Away a Camera’s Make and Model
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/08/11/18/0115242/digital-photos-give-away-a-cameras-make-and-modelDigital images contain their maker’s mark
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026826.200-digital-images-contain-their-makers-mark/Tracking where video was taken by the mains hum on the audio recording. Electrical network frequency analysis – ENF analysis is founded on research originally carried out by Dr Catalin Grigoras.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_network_frequency_analysishttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9739037/Met-Police-use-electrical-hum-to-solve-crimes.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20629671
https://perpetuityresearch.com/1748/solving-crime-with-only-a-hum-the-power-of-the-national-grid/
http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=14411
As long as terrorist videos help the security services, they will be allowed on the web. (Whether there will be any advertising next to them is a different matter.)
WhatsApp encryption is another RED HERRING because of zero-day vulnerabilities
January 2015 David Cameron made this statement:
Thanks to the CIA’s Dark Matter leak this month, we discovered that zero-day software has being deployed on computers and phones for a LONG time. Even Apple once thought to be pretty impregnable has been as open as the proverbial barn door.
http://thehackernews.com/2017/03/wikileaks-cia-mac-iphone-hacking.html
So what are Zero Days?
A zero-day vulnerability – commonly just called zero-days by hackers – is an undisclosed computer-software vulnerability that both hackers and the security services can exploit.
Zero-day software allows your devices to be controlled by other people – in most cases now; remotely. And this software implanted on the device is not detectable for many years into the future due to its sophistication.
With regards to computers and phones a zero-day allows the security services to read the messages of the terrorist as they are being typed into an application like WhatsApp before it’s even encrypted. So being able to decrypt the encrypted message is totally unnecessary. It’s red herring.
The British security services were using zero-day exploitation more than fifty years ago. During the early Common Market discussions in 1960 – 1963, We created remote monitoring facilities that could listen to the French encryption devices before the messages were encrypted. This was brought to light by Peter Wright’s revelations in Spy Catcher, published in 1987. The Song remains the same.
We live in a world where you can safely assume that any Internet connected device can be remotely monitored by the security services. The recent Wikileaks Dark Matter Leak implies this clearly.
The issue of encrypted communications is a red herring. That problem was solved a very long time ago, The bigger fish is whether the security services can use zero-days without a warrant and with impunity? This is the news item.
