The British security service MI5 and the electronic interception center, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), have been asked by the government to join the hunt for people who organized last week’s riots, the Guardian has learned.
The agencies, the bulk of whose work normally involves catching terrorists inspired by al-Qaeda, are helping the effort to catch people who used social messaging, especially BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), to mobilize looters.
A key difficulty for law enforcers last week was cracking the high level of encryption on the BBM system. BBM is a pin--protected instant message system that is only accessible to BlackBerry users.
MI5 and GCHQ will also help the effort to try to get ahead of any further organization of disturbances. They have a statutory right to target criminals or those suspected of being involved in crime, officials said yesterday.
Police struggled to access the BBM network last week, though some who received messages -planning violence were so outraged they passed them on to law enforcement agencies.
GCHQ’s computers and listening devices can pick up audio messages and BBM communications. MI5 and the police can identify the owners with the help of mobile companies and Internet service providers.
The agencies can intercept electronic and telephone messages, identify where they have been sent from and their destination. That allows other investigations to take place and other efforts to develop intelligence.
“The hope is this will boost the intelligence available. It’s always useful to get some boffins [researchers] in,” one source said.
In a speech on Monday, British Prime Minister David Cameron made no mention of his threatened clampdown on social media.
Last week, in the House of Commons emergency debate, he said: “There was an awful lot of hoaxes and false trails made on Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger and the rest of it. We need a major piece of work to make sure that the police have all the -technological -capabilities they need to hunt down and beat the criminals.”
For law enforcement, the difficulty with BBM is that it boasts semi-private — and instant — -access to a network of like-minded users.
BlackBerry handsets are the smartphone of choice for 37 percent of British teenagers, according to Ofcom. BBM allows users to send the same message to a network of contacts connected by “BBM pins.” For many teenagers, BBM has replaced text messaging because it is free and instant.
Unlike Twitter or Facebook, many BBM messages are untraceable by the authorities. And unlike Facebook, friends are connected either by individual pin numbers or a registered e-mail address. In short, BlackBerry Messenger is more secure than almost all other social networks.
So-called “broadcasts” can be sent to hundreds of disparate users within minutes, away from the attention of law enforcement agencies.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
A US YouTuber who caused outrage for filming himself kissing a statue commemorating Korean wartime sex slaves has been sentenced to six months in prison, a court in Seoul said yesterday. Johnny Somali, 25, gained notoriety several years ago for recording himself doing a series of provocative stunts in South Korea and Japan, and streaming them on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. South Korean authorities indicted Somali — whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael — in 2024 on public order violations and obstruction of business, and banned him from leaving the country. “The court has sentenced him to six months in
The death toll from a shooting in western Afghanistan rose to 11 on Saturday, after gunmen targeted civilians at a picnic spot in Herat, the provincial authority said. Bullet marks were visible on a wall of the Sayed Mohammad Agha Shia shrine, while bloodstains marked a blanket abandoned at the scene. “Eleven people have been recorded dead and eight others wounded from Friday’s incident, with the condition of two of the wounded reported as critical,” Herat’s information office said in a statement. The update raises a toll of seven killed provided on Friday by the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs
RSS