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A comment on Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017. Parent comment

Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by katastic on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @02:30PM (#15287446)
Your guess would be 100% correct.

We built huge spy networks only to find out that the terrorists don't even use the internet for their plans. They use burner phones and other non-tech solutions (paper?! omgawdwtf.) because (surprise!) they're harder to track on a systematic level.

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Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by astura on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @02:42PM (#15287577)
Before he was killed Bin Laden communicated with his inner circle only by USB drives transported by sneakernet - his bunker lacked Internet connection but his communications were electronic. I think some of his communication was re-transmitted by his couriers over the Internet though but not through locations that were physically near where he was hiding.
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Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by Pxtl on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @03:06PM (#15287829)
Really, he didn't have internet? I remember his final video and it was so laden with modern political jargon I'm really surprised - I kind of figured he'd spent the decade in hiding surfing political forums.
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Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by astura on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @03:10PM (#15287864)
His communication was two way, not just one way. It was just really slow and labor intensive.

I typed my last comment going from memory. I looked it up and my memory served me well, his bunker didn't have Internet. Looks like his USB drives weren't encrypted though, rookie mistake.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/how-bin-laden-emailed-without-b...

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Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by gertef on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @03:20PM (#15287960)
https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

""" I am careful in how I use the Internet.

I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see git://git.gnu.org/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation).

I occasionally also browse unrelated sites using IceCat via Tor. Except for rare cases, I do not identify myself to them. I think that is enough to prevent my browsing from being connected with me. IceCat blocks tracking tags and most fingerprinting methods.

I never pay for anything on the Web. Anything on the net that requires payment, I don't do. (I made an exception for the fees for the stallman.org domain, since that is connected with me anyway.) I also avoid paying with credit cards. """

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Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by B1FF_PSUVM on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @05:37PM (#15289053)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradecraft

Fortunately, nowadays half the planet's population are Stasi volunteers.

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Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by kevin_thibedeau on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @08:05PM (#15289772)
Doesn't he know Tor is completely compromised?
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Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by appleflaxen on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @08:31PM (#15289872)
that's news to me.

a cursory google search doesn't show anything substantive (only tor browser vulnerabilities).

are you saying that tor, the protocol, is compromised? what's the basis for your claim?

we do know that state actors can break it at great expense, but that isn't really a statement about tor weakness as much as it's a statement about the resources of state actors. and for a person like RMS who is likely not a state-level threat, his use of Tor probably does provide him with some degree of protection.

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Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by j_s on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @10:11PM (#15290240)
It has happened in the past (chosen example: 2014). Not sure if any current vulnerability is public.

https://blog.torproject.org/tor-security-advisory-relay-earl...

https://blog.torproject.org/did-fbi-pay-university-attack-to...

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Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by mandelbrotwurst on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @10:16PM (#15290261)
From a certain perspective, he is a "state-level" threat. Not an imminent, physical threat, certainly - this is a threat of a different type. He loudly and vigorously argues and advocates against various government policies and actions (as well as those of the largest corporations most deeply entangled with the state apparatus) and gives advice on how best to resist them.
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Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by mrguyorama on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @12:56PM (#15295915)
Weren't those side channel attacks? IE getting the tor browser to leak info over plain internet when connecting to an onion site so the connection could be correlated?
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Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by vacri on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @08:13PM (#15289795)
Part of how he was found included that the house he was in was the only one in the area that didn't have a phone line.
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Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by agumonkey on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @05:23PM (#15288944)
Now I'm curious, I wonder how feasible it would be to use acoustic sniffing to hear people like him talking or typing. Some guys infered letters from the sound of keystrokes.
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Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by s73ver_ on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @07:45PM (#15289683)
Wouldn't you have to be close enough to his location to where he'd be within a bomb's range anyway?
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Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by agumonkey on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @06:02AM (#15292090)
Sure but I'm not talking about killing but dismantling a terrorist network. Having more informations stealthily.
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Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by astura on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @06:17PM (#15289290)
Proof of concept has already been achieved: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/09/snooping_on_t...
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Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by nl on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @04:31PM (#15288524)
There's a big difference between Osama and your average everyday ISIS wannabe, who absolutely do use internet. Eg https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kb7n4a/isis-messa...
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Re:Twitter Suspends 300k Accounts Tied to Terrorism in 2017 by honestlyreally on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @07:53PM (#15289707)
They've been known to use pocket calculators for ciphers and transmit over radio frequencies digit by digit.
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