The cave-based Muslim terrorists who supposedly changed the laws of physics on September 11, 2011 are out there on the forefront of encryption software development if we can believe The Wall Street Journal.
As should be expected, Ed Snowden’s to blame.
“While U.S. government officials have contended that its adversaries would respond to revelations on NSA surveillance techniques with counter-measures of their own, there has been little public evidence that’s been the case. This is some of the first tangible evidence that al Qaeda and others may have responded by creating new encryption software,” writes Rachel King in response to Recorded Future report.
NSA has spent billions to crack encryption, but somehow al-Qaeda’s ostensible effort is setting off alarm bells.
In addition to Mujahideen Secrets, which supports mobile, instant messaging, and Macs, according to the web intelligence company, al-Qaeda has developed “new crypto products” and will “explore product developments following former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures.” Responding like a tech-savvy Silicon Valley startup, al-Qaeda and ISIS (also known as al-Qaeda in Iraq) responded within five or six months to Snowden’s revelations on NSA snoopery with a whole new toolkit of encryption goodies for email and instant messaging.
In order to draw a correlation between Snowden and the treasonous act of aiding and abetting the enemy, the WSJ drops a quote by terror opportunist and former NSC chief counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke: “What Snowden did made us less safe as a nation.”
In order to underscore the role of the WSJ in propagating this meme it is important to note it is the onetime home of Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisener, the mastermind behind the CIA’s “Mighty Wurlitzer” of propaganda.
Infowars.com argued soon after the NSA program was revealed during the Bush regime that dragnet surveillance has nothing to do with al-Qaeda which is itself primarily a cartoon villain exaggeration designed for propaganda purposes and as a public relations campaign for the national security state. NSA surveillance was implemented to surveil the American people who are the real enemy.
The lesson of the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the war on dissent revealed a deep-seated desire on the part of the establishment to defeat and destroy its political enemies. Glenn Greenwald recently pointed this out in The Guardian:
The perception that invasive surveillance is confined only to a marginalized and deserving group of those “doing wrong” – the bad people – ensures that the majority acquiesces to the abuse of power or even cheers it on. But that view radically misunderstands what goals drive all institutions of authority. “Doing something wrong” in the eyes of such institutions encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent behavior and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge. It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat.
The WSJ merely attempts to continue the perception there is a “marginalized and deserving group” that rationalizes all-encompassing surveillance of the American people and, ultimately, every person on the planet. If the war on largely manufactured terror is to remain open-ended, as promised, new threats need to be invented and, as we have seen, old ones recycled. Scapegoats like Ed Snowden need to be thrown in the mix in order to demonstrate that looking too closely at the now bulging facets of the panopticon state is a dangerous preoccupation.
Bruce Scheier, who writes on network security issues, believes the supposed cutting edge efforts of al-Qaeda are improbable. ” Cryptography is hard, and the odds that a home-brew encryption product is better than a well-studied open-source tool is slight,” he writes.
Scheier also believes the prospect of al-Qaeda pencil-neck geeks supposedly laboring over rocket science encryption helps the NSA and the snoopers, not the opposite. “I’ve been fielding press queries, asking me how this will adversely affect US intelligence efforts… I think the reverse is true. I think this will help US intelligence efforts.”
