The Committee to Nuke Elysium

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The ‘brand’ value of groups like GIMF and the al-Mahalem Media Foundation benefit from disseminating these tools. While the tools are less secure than their more popular, mainstream counterparts, actions like blatantly tagging all public keys with ‘#—Begin Al-Ekhlaas Network ASRAR El Moujahedeen V2.0 Public Key 2048 bit—’ and the group branding on the program itself promote the associated al-Qaeda media brands. Despite the fact that using these tools clearly increases the attack surface for these groups through easily identifiable and unique methods, the propaganda value seems to be worth it. In the online jihadist world there are continually competing tiers of forums, release groups, and actors, but less than a handful of encryption programs.

Taking the jihadist point of view, another reason for the development and use of these tools could be heightened mistrust. Anything outside the relatively small ecosystem of online jihadist circles is seen as suspect. Many take the ‘Leviathan’ view of the US and Israel, and continue to apply it towards the cynical views that any Western developed software could contain government backdoors. Even with the popularity of open source security programs, those less technically capable would have a much easier time trusting what’s known to be used by Anwar al-Awlaki, what’s promoted in Inspire, and by prominent jihadist hackers online.

Therefore, factors like attention and mistrust explain the divergence between indicators of technical expertise, like choosing AES finalists, and avoidance, like forgoing PGP or similar programs. These programs are less secure, but allow groups like GIMF to maintain their high profile and feed a confirmation bias of an all-powerful U.S. government. As for now, the programs may arguably protect against ‘backdoors’, but provide easily recognizable data to identify terrorist communications, organizations, and users online.

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