Jihadists Were Using Encryption Long Before the Snowden Leaks

Despite insistence from US officials that the Snowden revelations have caused irreparable damage to the country's national security efforts, a new report claims that the behaviour of Islamic terrorists has not changed as a result of the leaks.

Flashpoint Partners, an intelligence firm that specialises in jihadist activity, said that "there is very little open source information available via jihadi online social media that would indicate that Snowden's leaks served as the impetus for the development of more secure digital communications and/or encryption by Al-Qaida."

In fact, their research suggests that since the Snowden leaks, jihadists' discussion of encryption software has actually decreased. Analysing a pool of over 2.5 million forum posts on 38 different jihadi social networks, Flashpoint found that English and Arabic keywords such as "encryption" steadily petered out.

"If it were indeed the case that jihadi development and adoption of encryption tools were accelerated by the Snowden revelations, we would expect [to] see the exact opposite trend," the report notes. However, the authors point out the caveat that this is only based on information available on extremist forums, and not in personal messages, where sensitive topics such as encryption may be taking place.

It has to be said that some other reports suggest that encryption activity has in fact increased in response to the Snowden leaks. Last month, Recorded Future, a web intelligence firm, confidently stated that jihadi encryption techniques have dramatically changed post-Snowden. "Following the June 2013 Edward Snowden leaks we observe an increased pace of innovation," they wrote, "specifically new competing jihadist platforms and three major new encryption tools from three different organizations–GIMF, Al-Fajr Technical Committee, and ISIS–within a three to five-month time frame of the leaks."

But rather than drawing a link between the buzz around secure communications and the Snowden leaks, the Flashpoint report suggests that changes in interest more closely reflect the release of dedicated jihadist encryption programmes, or events surrounding them. These, Flashpoint claims, seem "to have had a far more noticeable impact in terms of driving waves of interest in the subject of encryption among users of jihadi web forums than the publication of the Snowden NSA revelations in June 2013."

For example, on February 7, 2013, around four months before the NSA stories broke, a new piece of encryption software was released called 'Asrar al-Dardashah.' This was a tool that allowed secure communications to be sent over Google Chat, Yahoo and other messaging services. Looking at Flashpoint's findings, the appearance of the tool seems to have been more of an impetus for discussions around encryption than anything revealed by Snowden.

The history of Islamic terrorists using encryption far predates Snowden, and even Wikileaks. An early milestone was an article in Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula's (AQAP) English language magazine Inspire in October 2010, which exhorted readers to use encryption.

The programme suggested then was Asrar al-Mujahideen, originally launched back in 2007. It runs in a similar vein to popular open source encryption Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), utilising public and private keys to securely send files and messages.

A 2.0 version was available in 2008, and after this other programmes came out for popular chat programmes, then Android and Symbian mobile devices.

From Asrar al-Mijahideen in 2007 to developments today, Flashpoint's findings suggest jihadists haven't made any major changes to their use of encryption: they're just taking established models and applying them to different areas, such as instant messaging services or mobile phones. "The underlying public encryption methods employed by online jihadists do not appear to have significantly changed since the emergence of Edward Snowden," the report states.

In summary, it seems jihadists were probably well aware of the benefits of encryption long before Snowden's leaks. Flashpoint concluded that, "As a result, the Snowden revelations likely merely confirmed the suspicions of many of these actors, the more advanced of which were already making use of—and developing—secure communications software."