Prolific propagandists unveil a new trick
The Islamic State’s (ISIS) most recent marketing maneuver features all the group’s usual hallmarks: gruesome beheadings, boastful threats, dessert landscapes and slick video production. But in an innovation, the video opens and closes with cryptic messages, apparently meant to be seen as forewarnings of where the group will strike next.
An opening message appears to be gibberish. As the video continues it’s decoded into a target list naming each of the locations struck last 13 November in Paris. A number of prisoner executions then follow, allegedly prerecorded by the Paris attackers while they underwent training in Syria or Iraq.
The seventeen minute propaganda movie then concludes with a second scroll of characters, a message left undecrypted. The implication – that ISIS is preparing to strike a second Western target and that the hidden message contains crucial information.
Where is Lisbeth Salandar when you need her?
The threat was encoded using Pretty Great Privacy (PGP,) a publicly accessible encryption and decryption software package. Shortly after the highly-coordinated attack in Paris, which killed 130 people, a former deputy-director of the CIA, Michael Morell, warned about the dangers of groups like ISIS taking advantage of encrypted communications.
This is an increasingly common argument from governments around the world, Mark Manulis, Deputy Director of the Centre for Cyber Security at Surrey University, told The Media Line. “They give this reason all the time, that they can’t detect or act in advance to prevent crimes if they are planned or discussed in an encrypted way,” Manulis said.
Encryption is used by many of us on a daily basis, whether we realize it or not. “Encryption is used everywhere, banking (or) messaging like WhatsApp, it all uses encryption,” Manulis said.
Software like PGP works using a public and a private key. Anybody can encrypt a message or a file using the publicly accessible key but only someone with the correctly corresponding private key can subsequently decipher the message.
There is fear that ISIS might be using such a tool to send messages to sympathizers or even to activate cells operating in the West. Such a hidden message could take some time to decode without a key.
“For a normal person or institution with the standard technology… it could be done but it would take a lot of effort, it could take years,” Emilio Tuosto, a lecturer with the department of Computer Science at the University of Leicester, told The Media Line. Rumors do exist that the United States National Security Agency has developed the technology to complete the same task in mere hours, but for the time being such speculation is unconfirmed, Tuosto noted.
A coded message at the end of a video could either be used by a terrorist group as a signature – to authenticate, for those with the correct key, that the video was truly released by them – or it could contain hidden information, such as instructions, Tuosto posited. The coded message could also mean nothing.
So should the West be worried that ISIS appears to be sending out hidden instructions to its followers via its propaganda videos?
Probably not says Scott Lucas, a professor of politics who specializes in media studies and the Middle East at Birmingham University.
Speaking with The Media Line, he said “there’s an obvious issue which is if you really are trying to keep your plot secret so you can carry it out you don’t tip off the intelligence services to what you are going to do,” Lucas said. If the message did contain information of value to anybody who decoded it then it would represent “an incredible mistake” on the part of ISIS, Lucas argued, adding, “I don’t buy it.”
Instead it is far more likely that the coded message is simply another propaganda tool, both weapon of intimidation and recruitment poster.
“What they are doing here is putting the wind up people…it’s all part of keeping people unsettled,” Lucas said. At the same time, he noted, the use of PGP is high-profile and boosts ISIS’s image as a high-tech, media savvy organization, something that will appeal to potential initiates.
“It’s a publicity stunt by ISIS and it gets a few people going, trying to do the decode just to make sure there is nothing there. It keeps us chasing our tails.”