Paris terrorists communicated via SMS without encryption

French police found a phone that belonged to one of the terrorists in a trash can near the Bataclan concert hall. In addition to the detailed short card , regular SMS messages were found on the phone, with which the criminals communicated with each other. One of them said " we are starting ." This is inconsistent with the charges according to which the terrorists used complex systems for encrypted communication in their activities.

After the terrorist attacks in Paris, the Western media unanimously blamed Snowden , WikiLeaks, and other people and organizations promoting the fight against government surveillance. According to the logic of the prosecutors, the dissemination of information about the mass eavesdropping of communications and the means of protection against wiretapping made the terrorists technically savvy. Allegedly, as a result of this, they were able to avoid the surveillance of the special services.
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The New York Times newspaper published a whole accusatory article in which it shared the opinion of unnamed officials from the European Government. These individuals claimed that the terrorists used some (by that moment it is not known exactly which ones) the means for encrypted communication. But for some reason, the article quickly disappeared from the newspaper’s site and is now available only in the Internet archive .

Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon told the Bulletin newspaper why European intelligence agencies find it so difficult to catch terrorists. According to him, they use the Sony Playstation 4 gaming chat network, which, as Gembon put it, “is even harder to track than WhatsApp”. As far as is known, no evidence of such non-standard use of game consoles in this case was found.

Other media outlets accused Pavel Durov and his service for Telegram encrypted communication that they were practically accomplices to the terrorists. One of the journalists asked Durov if he “sleeps well at night knowing that his service is being used by terrorists.”

Durov explained that, in his opinion, the right of people to privacy and privacy is more important than the fear that with the help of Telegram something bad can be done - for example, to engage in terror. He added that the terrorists in any case will find ways to communicate - if one of the methods does not seem sufficiently reliable to them, they will choose another.

Durov also said that after it became known that the terrorists use public chats to communicate and coordinate their actions, 78 identified chats held in 12 languages ​​were blocked.

MP Alexander Ageev, having learned about these accusations, even hurried to propose banning the Telegram service in Russia. In response to this proposal, Durov, in his usual manner, wrote in his VKontakte account : “I propose to ban words. There is information that terrorists communicate with them”. After that, Nikolai Nikiforov, the head of the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation, did not agree with the proposal of the deputy, and compared the restriction of access to messaging programs with blocking the entire Internet.