John Chase, hacktivist: Don’t blame Edward Snowden for Paris attacks

A Boston man who has participated in the campaign to combat the Islamic State terrorist group online says critics who blame NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for the terrorist attacks in Paris and the rise of ISIS are dead wrong. 

This week CIA Director John Brennan suggested that terrorists have been able to flourish in secret after Mr. Snowden revealed critical information about U.S. intelligence gathering. 

In response to revelations that French police had found encrypted apps on the Paris attackers’ cell phones, former CIA Director James Woolsey told CNN on Thursday, “The blood of a lot of these French young people” is on Mr. Snowden’s hands. 

But John Chase, 25, a cybersecurity advocate who has worked with hacking groups Anonymous and Ghostsec and previously spoke to the media under the pseudonym “XRSone,” told The Washington Times that Mr. Snowden is not to blame, and that the Islamic State terrorist group, also known as ISIS, was using encrypted apps and websites long before the NSA’s surveillance operations came to light.

“They were on the dark Web, pre-Snowden before he came out and released that information,” Mr. Chase said of the terror group. “And Snowden is not the first person to come forward and say the government is tracking people with metadata.”

In fact, Mr. Chase said terrorists like those in the Islamic State are well aware of the metadata and cell-phone tracking that U.S. intelligence agencies use to target them in drone strikes and they know not to be foolish enough to use a non-encrypted phone.

In addition to using the deep Web to thwart intelligence agencies, Anonymous hackers say Islamic State supporters have also made their way into the dark corners of the Internet for fundraising purposes.

GhostSec has said that the Islamic State is in possession of a massive bitcoin wallet worth more than $3 million. German news agency Deutsche Welle has also reported that the terror group is experimenting with currency, specifically gold and bitcoin. 

“There’s definitely a belief in the Anonymous sector that they’ve been using the dark Web for money and now there is definitive proof of it. It just reaffirms what we already thought.”

EU officials on Friday will discuss whether digital cryptocurrencies like bitcoin should be banned following the Paris attacks. 

Such currencies, absent a federal bank or governing authority, can be used to purchase goods without dealing with government regulations. 

But Mr. Chase said that while the terror group’s members and supporters have used the dark Web to their advantage when it comes to fundraising, they are nowhere near sophisticated enough to successfully carry out an attack on U.S. power and tech infrastructure. 

“The way they they are setting up these dark Web sites is kind of rookie-ish. It’s leading to even more speculation that they don’t know what they are doing,” Mr. Chase said. “Just the way that they set up their website on the dark Web, you can tell that they are pretty amateurish, they don’t have the tech savvy to go after the power grid. … I really can’t imagine they have any kind of capability to hack into that structure.”