Skip to main content

Encryption seems to have played little to no part in the Paris attacks

terrorists burner phones paris attack
Josep Suria/123rf
It was a very concerted effort that led to the Paris terrorist attacks last November. That much we already knew. What we didn’t know, up until the release of a 55-page report compiled by the French anti-terrorism police for France’s Interior Ministry, was the extent to which the terrorists used burner phones in order to avoid detection, reports The New York Times.

According to the report, the terrorists used either new phones or phones that were taken from their victims in order to communicate with each other. And the terrorists discarded all of them, with one assailant activating a phone less than an hour before he carried out a suicide attack.

Recommended Videos

The investigation of the terrorists’ movements revealed the repeated use of burner phones, with dozen of such phones discovered unused. This is where things get interesting, however, as among all the burner phones, there wasn’t a single e-mail or online chat message found. In other words, the assailants seemed to have known such communication venues would be monitored by intelligence agencies, and this appeared to lead them to rely on regular cellular network calls instead of encryption.

This information seems to show how effective the use of burner phones still is. The report as a result has the potential to undermine the argument that encryption creates an environment for terrorists to freely communicate with each other, the same argument currently used by the FBI and other agencies.

There was an instance when a woman saw what she believed to be “a bunch of lines, like lines of code” from a terrorist’s computer, which would coincide with ISIS’ claim of encryption use during the Paris attacks. However, the woman saw that when the computer was first booting up, which would likely indicate that it was just a verbose boot, or a boot that lets the user see the code output when your computer boots up.

Although last December, investigators believed that they had found encrypted apps used by the terrorists to hide their attack plotting, that was when the investigation was still nascent. The final 55-page report now appears to show that encryption had a small to nonexistent role in the Paris attacks.

Williams Pelegrin
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Williams is an avid New York Yankees fan, speaks Spanish, resides in Colorado, and has an affinity for Frosted Flakes. Send…
The best language-learning apps for 2024
best language learning apps.

Do you need help to learn a new language? You'll wish you'd known about these apps sooner. Learning a foreign tongue can be a real headache. But these top language-learning apps make it easy and fun with bite-sized lessons, quizzes, speech recognition, and more.

From gamified vocabulary builders like Memrise to apps that use TV shows to teach you a new language, there's something for every learning style and goal. Whether you want to master Spanish verb conjugations, read French novels easily, or learn some travel phrases, these apps have you covered. They are available for Android-based devices like the Pixel 9 Pro XL and Apple devices like the iPhone 16.
Duolingo

Read more
iOS 18.2 just took another step toward its official release
iOS 18 logo on the iPhone 16 Pro

Yet another iOS update is ready, and this one is important. The iOS 18.2 beta 2 update is live, and it's a big deal for a couple of reasons. It's available to more people than the previous beta, and it indicates another step toward iOS 18.2's public launch.

The first version of this beta was only available to people whose phones supported Apple Intelligence, but this latest version works with any phone that can update to iOS 18. Addditionally, iOS 18.2 beta 2 is only available to developer beta testers. There isn't a public beta at the moment, and we have no word on when one might release. Still, it's good to see that more people are included this time around.

Read more
A new update fixes the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s overheating issues — or does it?
The back of the Realme GT 7 Pro.

Since we performance tested the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite processor in the GT 7 Pro smartphone, Realme has insisted it has a fix coming for what it described as a “software compatibility” problem, which was causing the phone to overheat before it could complete a 20-minute gaming benchmark test.

Today, a software update containing the fix was delivered to our review model, with the promise it would solve the issue. Sure enough, after running the Solar Bay Stress Test — a 20-minute program that emulates gameplay with ray-traced graphics — in the 3DMark benchmark app, the Realme GT 7 Pro did indeed successfully complete it, giving us the performance figures we were missing during our initial comparison with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.
Still running hot
Realme GT 7 Pro results from the 3DMark Solar Bay Stress Test Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

Read more