What Would Osama Do?
Over the past couple of years, the British Government (amongst others) has made repeated noises about the use of the Internet by terrorist and other criminal groups. Services like Skype, Hotmail and Facebook, are all big targets (and all huge consumer operations).
The fact is, though, that if the terrorists were remotely as tech-savvy as our politicians are claiming, they wouldn’t bother with any of these things, and they certainly wouldn’t continue to do so once news circulates of yet another plan to engage the site operators in a monitoring exercise.
Criminal gangs have been operating on the Internet for years. Where do you think the botnet the BBC recently bought came from? I’ll give you a hint: they didn’t buy it on a Facebook group.
The Internet, as a sprawling entity, just provides infrastructure, and there are lots and lots of applications which run on it—many of them things that officials in the Home Office will have never heard of. Why bother using the ones which are blindingly obvious and trivial to monitor (the web, e-mail), when there are so many others to choose?
This leads to a number of possibilities: either (a) the Bad Guys are far less tech-savvy than officials would have us believe, (b) what we’re seeing is a reflection of what officers from Five or Six would do when presented with the same problem (which would be somewhat disturbing, as it’d demonstrate that same degree of technical-ignorance), or (c) it’s largely a smokescreen and concerned far more with benefit fraudsters, people gaming the school catchment areas, and quiet dissent.
Otherwise, I look forward to the response from the people who make the Internet tick when the Home Office proposes logging all TFTP traffic.
