The FBI Is Blind To ISIS Communications

by JASmius



And this time, it isn't Rand Paul's and Mitch McConnell's fault - yet, anyway:

There are too many ways for ISIS to use encryption on various social media sites to spread its message, U.S. officials told a House Homeland Security Committee hearing Wednesday, warning there is no way to monitor all of the militant group's online communication.

"There are two hundred-plus social media companies," Michael Steinbach, who heads the FBI's counterterrorism division, told committee members, reports Fox News. "Some of these companies build their business model around end-to-end encryption. There is no ability currently for us to see that."

The encryption methods allow ISIS propagandists to send messages to as many as two hundred thousand people worldwide, it was pointed out during the hearing, and Steinbach warned members that "we're past going dark in certain instances. We are dark."

Part of the issue is that technology is developing faster than are laws that allow communications to be intercepted....

Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-TX10, said that even a warrant or a wiretap often is not enough to stop conspirators, as technology has gotten past that.

"Even if we have coverage by, let's say, a warrant or a wiretap, they can then jump into a message box and then to another platform that's called dark space that we can't cover and we don't know what those communications are," said McCaul.

The logic of this trend is not something that Paulnuts and civil libertardians are going to want to hear: Far from scaling back government counter-terrorism surveillance, this report makes it abundantly clear that it needs to be expanded even further to these encrypted platforms and other higher-tech communications mediums.  We not only need full Patriot Act back, we need a Super-Patriot Act on steroids.

Not that we're going to get it until after ISIS has incinerated downtown Chicago or wherever....



....We've returned to the full September 10th mindset and are going to have to get hit much harder to (temporarily) restore our public focus again.  But as Pamela Geller warned yesterday, ISIS is indeed coming for all of us.  And if, far from just not being able to connect the dots, counter-terrorism officials can't even discern the dots themselves, we'll never see them coming, and uncounted additional numbers of American civilians will die, horribly and needlessly.

Again.

In a shrinking world of widely proliferated and readily available weapons of mass destruction, that's a price to pay for "liberty" that may be too prohibitive for either liberty OR security. Because, two and a quarter centuries later, the two, contra Benjamin Franklin, really have become two sides of the same coin.