PARIS: Intelligence officials in Europe and the US were picking up “chatter” as early as September about a potential Daesh-related attack on France but lost the ability to track the exchanges when the militants switched to encrypted communications, an American law enforcement official said Monday.
The discussions flowed from Daesh leaders in Syria to recipients in Europe, apparently including the Brussels-based terror cell French authorities now believe carried out Friday’s attacks in Paris, said the official, who requested anonymity because of the delicacy of the investigation into the coordinated shootings and bombings that killed 129 people and wounded hundreds more.
But no specific time or place for an assault was mentioned, and the threat sounded similar to other signals picked up by European and American authorities, the official said.
And then the line went silent, because the militants switched in September from open communication sources to so-called PS4 embedded devices — such as Sony PlayStation 4 equipment — that use encryption and block authorities from tapping them, the official said.
“The French were trying to find out anything more about the chatter, and they got behind it,” the official said. “But it went bad.”
