Extreme security with your fingerprint . Your fingerprint encrypts your call. Use this application for secure communication. This application uses industry leading encryption techniques .. Super Secure Free Calls available
TFA states that the app author was listed as 'David Keynes of Beaverton, Oregon'. Looking at the text from the author's Wordpress site [2] and app description, one could possibly come to the conclusion that the author is not a native english speaker (or has substandard grammar skills). 'David Keynes' a non native english speaker? Putting that together with claims of 'Super Secure Free Calls'. Something doesn't add up here..
There are also hardly any search queries on Google trends [1], and less than 10 total tweets in Turkish between 2014-01-01 and 2016-07-16 [2]. Very strange, indeed.
one of the tweet says: beware people in the government, these guys use some app called bylock, I hope you haved "cracked" it already.
another(from a gulenist it seems) says, guys don't use the same app for communications over and over, try to be more diverse (talk about an app called kakao)
Obviously, this app was known by public. So, I am not sure if they would risk themselves to use it to plan something illegal. Yet, things in Turkey are getting very amateurish in every aspects for the last decade. So, luckily for the sake of bits and pieces of Turkish democracy, this coup attempt was also amateurish.
However; I have the tendency to believe that Erdoğan knew that they were working on something nasty and he might had even encouraged it indirectly. So that, he could control it and benefit from it.
I must say that I have biased opinions against Erdoğan.
*@pazartesi2014 says
@kuscusencer ByLock programınıda umarım çözmüssünüzdür Reis paralelciler buna sardılar şimdi
--
@kuscusencer I hope you have decrypted the ByLock app, Reis (an informal expression, meaning superior). Gulenci People have started use this.
And this guy seems like from the movement
@nifaksavar
Arkadaslar sürekli aynı servis sağlayıcıyı kullanmayın bylock kakao vb..
---
Friends, don't always use the same service provider bylock, kakao etc..
I don't want to get all tinfoil, but have read many who have insinuated that this may have been an inside job by president of Turkey to get rid of dissenting voices.
This sort of thing kinda lends credence to that sort of idea.
It's my understanding that he's been putting his own people in high military positions for a while now. So it's not surprising that he could have short circuited the coup mechanism.
Having said that, I stayed up watching the whole thing, and it never felt very real. There's no way you're going to fire on people in the streets with a helicopter but not shoot down the president's plane. Hell, they didn't even arrest the Parliament.
And the President got exactly what he wanted out it, an increase in popular support and a consolidation of power. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he had a hand in his own coup attempt as a way to solidify his grasp on power.
Well this is the same president who had his officials caught red handed a couple years ago planning a false flag on themselves to start a war in syria.
Not the craziest thing to say he would setup a coup against himself.
It seems quite likely to me. Like why launch the coup at prime time, arrest zero government members, leave most TV stations running and not fire on Erdogan's plane? Also the guy who "allegedly gave the order that set the coup in motion" was one of Erdogan's AKP mates brother. Just today the guy who bombed the parliament was testifying and said he was instructed to drop a bomb in the parliament garden. I mean why bomb the garden if not for theater?
What I'm wondering is where things go from here and if anyone can do anything about it. I'm guessing the likes of the NSA probably have some info on who did what if they feel like using it.
Very few of the army generals were his supporters. From now on surely numbers will go up. But it is clear that for more than 20 years it was Gulen who put his followers to police force, army and all state departments (especially justice) semi-secretly. It was a network of people who collected information and kept things moving according to their agenda.
I get scared when I hear how many Turkish people talk about the Gülenist movement. The similarities to communism in the US during the 50s and 60s is striking. Sure, based on a "true story" but in the same way that the movie 300 is.
The Gulenist movement was very involved in education. They had maybe hundreds of schools in every category of Turkish education system, and they have some Turkish language schools abroad too, and also provide loads of scholarship. The general opinion is that through these schools they were raising loyal members of the movement who'd go into all sorts of public and private institutions as high-rank employees. This opinion exists at least since 90's, and is vastly popular. It's known that members pay a fixed amount (AFAIK a percentage of their monthly pay) monthly to the organisation. Most members are conservative celebs, conservative enterpreneurs and white collar types.
After their break-up with AKP, when the corruption scandals showed up, the movement quickly became the scapegoat of the ruling party, accused of having formed a "parallel statal system". IDK if Gulen himself organised this coup (how can I know), but I can say that, reasoning on the Turkish public's view of the movement, including third party stories I've heard over the years (tho I've never met a member), they certainly have the network, hierarchy and the power to do it. It may also be someone in their hierarchy below Gulen that organised it. Time will show us the reality, I think.
The break-up happened before the corruption scandal, things soured because of political disagreements (Gulenists were not happy that government was trying to initiate talks with Kurdish groups. Everything about these talks collapsed later on.) Corruption scandal was their attempt to take down Erdogan who clearly had became an enemy element according to them.
Interesting tidbit: The officials who went to kill/capture Erdogan was told the group of soldires that they were to "pick up a high level PKK operative (A Kurdish terrorist organisation) in Marmaris." http://www.milliyet.com.tr/-gerekirse-olun-ama-gundem-228033...
IMO, even though in general movement has nationalistic tendencies, It cannot be said "they are not fond of Kurds" (as an ethnicity). However, their agencies were making a lot of negative press on the last peace process. Also, they were quite likely behind exposing secret peace meetings and mass detaining of kck members in (if I recall correctly) 2010. Apparently Kurdish problem was one of the main issues of conflict.
I didn't mean that they were not fond of Kurds, they believed the initiative/talks in 2010's were wrong and would throw country into chaos (ironically this can be seen as a self fulfillig prophecy because of their actions).
But the Gulenist movement really is that creepy. It sounds more like scientology. Or maybe even more like a beefed-up version of Tvind, if you've heard about that.
There's also the little thing that they used to be on Erdogan's side, too, and helped him purge the military of officers who might topple him. Check out operation sledgehammer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sledgehammer_(coup_plan)
I had a look and it seems then the Gulenists were having a go at the army for allegedly plotting a coup. Later the big falling out between Erdogan and the Gulenists was when some of them tried to prosecute his cabinet for corruption. Is fighting coups and corruption through the legal system so bad? It seems to be the latter action of having a go at corruption that freaked Erdogan out and made him call them terrorists. He also called academics who signed a petition for peace terrorists and is now saying the west is supporting terrorism for not supporting him now. But he used to seem ok with buying oil from ISIS. He's got some funny ideas about that stuff.
Its crazy how the liberal media is anti-Erdogan for understandable reasons (not being a Euro-style liberal), but the Gulen movement is a straight up theocracy. Erdogan has a religiosity of a George Bush. Gulen wants to be like the Iranian Ayotollah but seen as a living prophet as well.
I think liberals and the liberal media are picking sides here, and they shouldn't be. Erdogan's vision of Turkey is far more secular and liberal than what the Gulenist movement wants. Turkey seems in better hands with the current leadership, which wins elections and is a strong NATO partner, compared building another middle-east theocracy. Like most politics, its a case of the lesser evil. I'm not exactly sure what liberals think is possible in Turkey, but migrating to a UK or French level of liberalism in what's a highly religious and conservative country isn't realistic. Even if it was, guys like Gulen aren't going to get you there.
This is a bit like leaving Catholicism to become a Scientologist. You're better off staying Catholic and trying to reform the church from within.
People say that about Gulen but there doesn't seem much evidence eg. his recent statement "Like many Turkish citizens, the Hizmet movement’s participants supported Mr. Erdogan’s early efforts to democratize Turkey and fulfill the requirements for membership in the European Union."
On the other hand Erdogan is racing to world #1 in closing news outlets, throwing reporters in jail, threatening anyone who speaks against him and so on.
Then Gulen's party can win elections instead of having their loyalists in the military blow up civilians. Why are we excusing mass murder now? The coup attempt killed a lot of people for no reason and Gulen's people need to be held accountable.
Or are you saying that the Turkish people don't have a right to self-determiniation and elites like yourself should prescribe who their leaders are? Liberals decry overthrowing Iran and other governments, but here they are, pleading to overthrow Turkey. Its bizarre.
How about letting the democratic process work itself out and stop murdering civilians?
I'm all in favour of democracy which works better if you don't close half the press and I'm all in favour of punishing the murderers who are found guilty of murder based on evidence. Being guilty of being Gulenist is a different thing.
How exactly was all those teachers involved in the coup?
No, that kind of group think is a consequence of not having proper freedom of press and proper freedom of association in the country. Which in turn is a consequence of voting for Erdogan (even if not everything was roses on that front before Erdogan, to be fair).
If they weren't involved that is OK. But if they supported this organisation in anyway it should be examined. Of course every legal action should be taken with evidence. Legal action was ongoing and slow. And I was supporting event-based trials not something like witch hunt. However after the coup attempt any state would take drastic actions to secure itself. And don't forget that most of the people supports this. (They bombed national council!). There are many background events you may or may not know, like mobbing other soldiers to resign, stealing questions of state entrance exam and sharing in their secretive organisation, businesses were threatened etc. Imagine something like that happens in a (rich) western country. It is hard to imagine, because they wouldn't allow it from the beginning... Situation is not clear and not black&white. In Turkey people try to choose lesser evil every time.
Actually, I'd claim that democratic countries would limit the drastic choices to the short period when it is actively defeating the actual coup. After the coup failed, there is plenty of time to be methodological and not harm the rule of law. If members of some group do something bad, then use the law to fight the wrongdoers for the actual crimes that has been committed.
As for businesses being threatened, how many media businesses have been closed by Erdogan? Free press is not optional for something that claims itself to be a democracy. Turkey is worst in class in that department, and as long as that is the case, whatever people support doesn't really matter, because the leader can dictate what news they see (or not).
I agree with you in general. I think the key justification point for ongoing trials is this organisation is in the works of infiltrating the government since 1970's. Also I am aware that Erdogan helped this organisation in the past, so I'm not a supporter. I only think it is better for the future of Turkey to get rid of a secretive organisation like this.
>"As for businesses being threatened, how many media businesses have been closed by Erdogan?"
Erdogan and Gulen organisation in police and in judicial system done those things together. Every trial that is against Gulen's opponents contamined with fabricated proofs.
>"Turkey is worst in class in that department"
I sadly agree with you.
>"whatever people support doesn't really matter, because the leader can dictate what news they see (or not)."
Things are a bit complicated than that in Turkey. Most of the people hated Gulen's organisation before 2013, where Erdogan and Gulen media protected and praised him. Also other political parties support Erdogan in this case...
Did I say they were involved? Most likely they were clueless. I meant once the the decision makers of the movement are even slightly involved with this, people will blame it all. This is a natural reaction. Besides, on the flip side, movement has more serious `group think` issues than others.
There are more serious evidence to consider than a clueless random TV reporter's blunder. I will say statements of many captive officers and government workers but I guess you will say they are fabricated. A former police (who was fired because of a link with them) was found in a coup tank with army suit. You will say it was his personal vendetta. There are recordings of people hinting the event a month ago in public domain. Then you will say it is just not apparent. Bias is a problem but I think evidence so far is quite clear.
I haven't looked at the APK metadata, but I certainly wouldn't dismiss that out of hand - the author is apparently from the US, but has a Türkçe keyboard on display in a demo screenshot?
Yes, that is what I was referring to. Of course it doesn't prove anything either way. It's simply one data-point surrounding the app, and its relevance is not clear (after all, I don't know who uploaded the screenshot, although those accounts do look like "test" accounts a dev might use?).
I think I might take a closer look: if Matt Green found this app entertainingly bad, even though I'd never heard of it before today, that makes me a little curious.
I'll probably announce if there are any clear signs, but Matt seemed to have not found any, and that wouldn't surprise me: attribution is rarely easy and caution always needs to be borne in mind as to accuracy - especially when it comes to trying to tell apart intentional awfulness (happily, rare - but not completely unheard of) from genuine amateur hour (sadly, all-too-common).
As a clever attacker who wanted a backdoored app could well just deliberately outsource it to someone cluelessly inept, for that authentic (and, incidentally, ultra-cheap) feel, there's an element of Poe's law at hand: how do you ultimately know?
Is it even tinfoil-y at this point? Every time there's some new revelation or some new action taken by the president it all points to it being a faked coup to expand his power.
Well at one point after coup every theory about what happened seemed reasonable to many people in Turkey. "That seems reasonable, that also seems reasonable, hmm that is also possible..." However I don't think it is (all) fake. Because many high ranked generals risked their lives and there were moments where the winner is unknown. The coup was a failure because: they had no people or political party support, they were forced to act quickly(Government would purge most of the generals in incoming days), they couldn't get the support of all military personnel. Probably, this was their last hope for power-grab and they gambled.
I'll give you that that Bellingcat stuff makes it look like it wasn't Erdogan arranged. It doesn't seem terribly Gulenist either. Seems quite possible it was secular / nationalist army types similar to Turkey's previous coups. Erdogan was obviously out to get Gulenists before the coup as he must have had the list of judges to fire prepared before hand so it's quite likely that he's taking the opportunity to have a go at them regardless of evidence one way or the other.
It is overwhelmingly evident that coup was at least partly planned by Gulenists. There are tens of coup confessions making a direct link to the group already. All political groups in Turkey have a consensus on this.
However somewhat foreign press is trying hard to see it other way. Many foreign journalists even supported the coup instead of condemning until failure is imminent. Some reasons can be that they just dislike the current president and often their information sources are people who are affiliated with the cleric's movement.
Clearly this coup attempt gave a golden opportunity to the president to purge Gulen followers from the state and nobody is denying this. But that is the expected behavior, whether or not it is justified. To me, Gulen and his upper hierarchy just blindly pushed all their low rank followers to the fire (most probably did not have a clue about the coup).
I've grown up in semi-oppressive regime and let me tell you, Erdogan's behavior is comic-book dictator in prime example, let's say Putin-style. i don't see person like him going away from power anytime soon.
oh and what happened to the stories of his son trading oil with ISIS, and his daughter building hospitals to treat wounded ISIS mercenaries?
3 years ago I visited turkey, it seemed like nice country with nice people, but these days I only wish it would be further away from Europe. and to think such a place wanted to join EU...
Come visit again, please. It is still nice country with nice people. It only has bad friends as the saying goes. The geography has a lot of problems. There are a lot of strategies and games played by many players so disinformation is everywhere. I wish Turkey was an island nation.
I respect your opinion and also think it is not a classy move by Erdogan.
On the other hand joking, criticizing and insulting different things and Germany actually prosecuted the comedian for that event. So in that sense German legal system thinks Erdogan is right, and he only used his legal rights?
I enjoy watching US political debates and as far as I can see they are free to insult everyone. Sometimes that brings color to conversation and I wish we had more freedom to insult in Turkey.
For the EU membership, I have complicated feelings. When I look from the perspective of EU. I don't know what will Turkey bring to EU? Opportunities or risks? Probably both. They may not want to deal with minor or major problems Turkey brings and that is OK. As a Turkish citizen and a curious person for different cultures, I would love to experience and learn from what EU brings.
Maybe I just can't sense the boiling, maybe we got used to getting shocked... But Turkey feels the same at everyday life.
Ton of coup confessions? When the KGB-like service gets anyone in their hands, they can make him or her confess anything. That's like Dictatorship 101.
Or maybe they were involved and confessed during questioning for a bargain? Just because they did not tell things you wanted to hear doesn't mean they were given under duress or torture.
In any legal system that deserves to be called legal, sole confession without other strong material evidence is not acceptable.
Bargain, sure... No beating, no electro-shocks, no sleep deprivation. They just ask politely and show a little friendliness. Right.
If they have material evidence, what's the use of a "confession"? If they don't, there's something fishy already.
BTW, there obviously WAS some sort of coup or "coup". But who pulled the strings, what were the intentions, and, most importantly, were all those tens and hundreds of thousands people involved is completely fishy, judging by the news, and especially official news from Turkey.
I understand the skepticism, this is my personal observation so far. I read the initial statements, in time there will be court proceedings, and more data. They seem quite genuine to me. Unfortunately they are mostly in Turkish.
You can deny everything and anything. However claiming Turkey is governed with dictatorship will not make you right. You need to put more evidence on the opposing theories and so far they do not add up.
But two religious anti-republicans admittedly helped each other into government and supposedly into even the most republican parts of government. But they turn on each other using the most republican wing?
If "Gulen's people" existed in government then they would have a police run coup with a thin veneer of military. They would also keep as much from the military as possible since they are the type of trash the military takes out whenever it is in cleanup mode.
Gulen is pretty obviously Erodogan's version of a US vice president. A stupider version of himself that no one wants and stays a threat if the president is removed by force.
But they were in the police force, after things really started to break between Erdogan and Gulen (December 2013) Erdogan made many interventions to clean police force.
> Erdogan made many interventions to clean police force.
Ok, so then the people Erdogan moved into the military between 2010 and 2013 they were these remaining Gulen supporters in government that are intent on destroying the republic? Or he decided not to out existing Gulen supporters he helped sneak in to the military before 2010 to either his new or its past republican leadership, (which would happily contain or remove such elements.)
None of this makes any sense unless he is admitting that he was an element of a religious group's conspiracy to corrupt the republic until 2013 and now also thinks his own continuation of power is more important than whatever religious beliefs he feels trump the republic. (A republic can't matter to a conspirator against it, right?)
That sounds like it would be slight if someone other than Erdogan said it about him and a terrible official position for a president of a republic. So what is his official position on the past that makes sense with all of this data about a Gulen lead conspiracy to destroy the Turkish Republic that began "decades before" their 2013 split?
"Rabbimden af milletimden özür diliyorum dedim. Çünkü burada hata yapmışız."
"I said that I apologize to my nation, ask for forgiveness from my god. Because we made a mistake here."
Gulen's organisation is older, they started to recruit people to state positions starting from 1970's. Erdogan and Gulen supported each other after 2002 election. Both benefited from this partnership at that time. Especially after Ergenekon trials, the army lost the ability to clean Gulen supporters. The organisation spread like a virus, capturing key positions faster.
As the remaining uneaten pie got smaller, they realized the country is not big enough for two of them(2011-2013). I think that too much centralized power is a bad thing. Something like checks and balances is needed in Turkey. However at this point it is better for a selected goverment to be in power than a secretive ponzi-scheme-like organisation(lesser evil mindset). Ironically Erdogan says now: "we were deceived". Other political parties say: "what if you get deceived again?".
If you are interested there are more info on the background of events in some wiki pages:
Well, there are even more tons of "confessions" of the accused that "confess" NOT being part of the coup. I hope you'll give them the same weight as the opposite confessions.
OK. So now we are limiting this to the army and leaving teachers and flight attendants out.
And all (or many) of those army officials allegedly involved in the coup attempt eagerly "confessed" their erroneous ways, while none of them denied being involved in a coup?
That's what I'm talking about. If there is evidence about person X doing some criminal deed (shoting soldiers) that in itself is sufficient for prosecuting him. You do not need his "confession" for that.
The problem is about prosecuting 99000 teachers, academics, and other "inconvenient" people, without much more than a hint that they do not like you or that they make fun of your similarity with Golum.
It feels quite strange. The app is supposedly made by a single person, who decided to... unpublish the app because it was too popular? And then, he kept a central server up and running to support the app nearly two years after that? There are 1951 user ratings for an average of 4 stars, and the creator claimed that there were about 1M users, yet hardly anyone has heard of it? The app also doesn't seem to have any ads from the screenshots.
A consequence of unpublishing the app is that the user has to check "allow untrusted sources". That could in turn be practical if your goal is to install spyware (unless byLock itself contains the spyware which might be too obvious).
It is funny and everyone in Turkey laughs at them. By the way this is a private television not state tv. There is also no clean hands right now. However these all shouldn't make this coup attempt seem less serious.
It's so curious that, the coup attempters were advertised as using whatsapp on the 15th and the days following that. There were many screenshots of the aforementioned communications with hints to the events of the night, like, "Can someone get to the çamlıca and bring down all the anntenas?". These were probably true and were on the phones of the captured soldiers. http://www.ilgisel.com/uploads/8/2016/07/16/_578a394ac9c92.j...
And now, they started using another app byLock? This smells like another attempt at falsifying data and diversion, which IMHO means they are creating false evidence for apprehending people they deem rivals. Currently there is an ongoing witch hunt in Turkey.
It's important to remember that Turkish military in the post-empire had practically a mandate of rebelling against unconstitutional and Islamist governments. Their power to do so was largely removed recently ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Armed_Forces)
Why is it important to remember that right now? I dislike Erdogan, but it isn't that simple. Did Erdogan really set up an unconstitutional Islamist government? Really really?
You sound like you read the Wikipedia page last week.
Or just don't use tools you don't understand enough to rely on in such a critical use case. My viewpoint is from a very developer's perspective, and rebels may not all possess the needed technical insight, but this looks like amateur hour. They must have trusted some technical person's advice in their organization, if they're a group, and you could be right that they were missing a sufficiently skilled CTO for such an operation.
Coups aren't a new invention, they were happening since people first organized into a society. Securing an organization is not a purely, or even primarily, a computer problem. Newest "encrypted" chatapp du jour is only a distraction, and should be at best treated as a shiny replacement for walkie-talkies. If someone is so stupid to base the security of their op on a chat app, frankly, they deserve to fail.
Not good enough, you still have metadata, which in this case is gold. "So you were messaging General X, while he was performing the coup. Would you like to tell us more about this, maybe during some waterboarding?"
Email addresses are not necessarily identifiable. Use a VPN or TOR and setup a Gmail account. Or maybe buy a prepay GSM card with 3G bandwidth included, and use it while moving through town.
Have you actually tried to set up an anonymous gmail account recently? Because I think you'll find that it is borderline impossible. Gmail's algorithms end up requiring SMS authentication when you're working over tor, which essentially deanonymizes you or requires the additional step of getting a burner phone for SMS; neither of which is good and probably will get you on all sorts of lists...
The barrier on PGP or GPG is EXTREMELY high for a bunch of normal people on various kinds of cell phones. I can see why someone found an app that someone thought was secure and everyone went with it.
If you read the alleged chat logs of how they coordinated the event, you will see that there was little coordination to begin with, regardless of the medium. If there had been proper planning, they first of all wouldn't have used a chat room, and they also wouldn't have used a tool that logs chats. This is not how military commanders instruct their troops in the field.
I'm really curious. What is the wise CTO's recommendation for a coup's way to securely message?
As one of the other commenters said, WhatsApp and Signal still rely on third parties to host the system. But doesn't Signal simply have each device generate a private key that it claims it never knows about so even if the Signal server were hacked it still wouldn't compromise existing keys?
PGP (or Keybase.io) seems like too much work for non-techies.
I'm not as familiar with Telegram.
In the end, could you do any better than a trusted third party providing a protocol it claims generates keys on your device and doesn't share them?
Oldie but goodie - Robert Heinleins 'Moon is a harsh mistress' gives anyone interested a nice introduction into coups, cells and other things conspiracy.
But before you go live, you don't know if your peer cells are real or just illusions set up to lure you into an ineffective attempt. With Gülen and AKP being such a narrow spectrum historically, changing sides is just a tiny shift in loyalty. It would be very easy to set up fake cells in that situation, it might even happen accidentally (formerly real cells not telling their peers about getting second thoughts).
But I fully agree with your subtext: it's not a technical problem.
Have the NSA design one for you through a front and have the Americans on your side (publicly or not).
It really depends on who you are trying to depose. I wouldn't trust any device if you were going against the interests of America / NATO, there are just too many opportunities for side channels. Likewise if it were using Chinese hardware against China. Assume you're compromised in either situation regardless of how secure your encryption seems to be.
Both WhatsApp and Signal allow verification of the keys. Signal will error out if you change devices - contacts must manually OK it to continue. I think WA has this too, maybe?
Signal also had some sort of work towards preventing contact list disclosure.
At a state level, there's also traffic analysis. If you find Target A then look at their traffic, you might be able to time-coordinate messages sent to other users. (Target->Signal Servers->Recipient)
Guess they could take the Signal source and run their own copy of it, too, eh? I'd also add a time-based auto-wipe function to Signal, which is useful if your are suddenly captured. Doing it by hand is tedious, so people don't. Signal doesn't do this because they don't want people to think it implements a secure remote wipe. But they should consider the problem of an activist having their phone recovered. If the app would delete on time, it'd mitigate some damage.
But remember that Turkey is a NATO ally, so you're up against the NSA, CIA and MI6 for starters (in addition to the fine intelligence service of Turkey).
So I would think that Signal would have to hand out all registered phone numbers in Turkey - a list which could be checked against all military personnel. Given that they've detained thousands of teachers, I don't think they'd be above detaining thousands of suspected troops, even at the risk of waterboarding loyalists.
You don't need an accurate list, just some help "short listing" people.
Similar issue with Tor - if you're in the military and your mobile device used Tor before/during the coup, you'd be on a watch-list (or shot).
The best op-sec is the terrorist/stay-behind/contras: small independent cells, with no knowledge or communication with each other. Obviously some plan is needed to set up a command and control structure when the coup is "won". I don't think there are any great solutions here, that also doesn't leak enough meta-data to get you tortured and killed in the event of a failed coup.
One way would be to use any standard messaging app, but bury the message in the noise. Make it look enough like normal communication and provide only as much signal to the people who need it and could fly under the radar long enough to pull it off.
A modern, digital scheme similar to this is called 'chaffing and winnowing' [2]. Both are steganography rather than encryption, but the intent is the same -- to communicate securely over an insecure channel.
OTR messaging is encrypted (only intended recipients can read your messages), authenticated (you can verify intended recipients identity), deniable (anyone can forge messages after a conversation to look like you sent them), and forward-secret (if you loose your keys, previous conversations aren't compromised).
Also, it is wise to communicate as little as possible. Chatter can be detected to see who are involved. It often doesn't matter what you said, if you were involved or engaged with the wrong people, you may find yourself zip-tied in a stress position.
The trouble with WhatsApp in practice in this coup is the coup guys messaged in larger groups and the messages are stored on the handset. Erdogan's guys only needed to get hold on one or two unlocked handsets to get the messages. (https://xkcd.com/538/). Something like snapchat where they disappear after a bit might have been better.
For those under opression from the government it is not so easy to adopt the secure, but obscure solutions like GPG. The problem is that just installing GPG or setting up a secure communications hub can make you a target for further investigation.
This discussion highlights how important it is that the normal messaging applications we use on daily basis become secure and protect the messages and identities of those communicating. This is not because you or I have something to hide or protect, but because other people in other countries do. And in order to keep themselves under the radar, they need to be using the same tools as we do.
Doesn't really matter. If you're doing something that's risking your or someone else's lives, you better be sure about the security aspects of a tool. Neither WhatsApp nor Signal are it because you're still trusting a 3rd party way more than is healthy for an operation like a coup. I've read some of the alleged chat logs, and the whole event looks haphazard and little planned. Therefore, it's no wonder that they would coordinate in an unsafe medium (WhatsApp). If what we're being told is the truth, that is.
They probably should've gone old-school and kept their plots strictly to meatspace. It's a lot simpler that way. Any digital supplementation should've been seriously restrained, relying on pre-determined, inconspicuous code phrases buried within an otherwise innocuous conversation.
Yeah, and assuming the chat logs are real, they now have a hard time to construct plausible deniability after the fact. But, what the people of Turkey seem to ignore is that soldiers are trained to take orders, and there aren't many around who would refuse, even if they're opposed to the action.
No, I'm saying that this whole event looks amateurish, without careful planning and coordination beforehand, which would have avoided the need to idle in a chat room, waiting for instructions.
The generals involved surely had secure means of communication which isn't logged, or at least knew what not to use, in case they want to deny events.
Using a random messaging app, believing that it's encrypted, and that being enough, is very naive.
The use of the app wasn't the reason why the coup failed.
I'm also skeptical that a conspiracy involving thousands of individuals (all using this one app) somehow didn't leak until after the coup? The answer is probably that the purges didn't really have anything to do with the coup.
Chat groups, even if p2p and encrypted, are vulnerable. A single group member's unlocked phone can be captured, thus compromising all group communication
Shiny hipster chatapps from SV do not make the need for tried-and-true century-old OPSEC techniques disappear. Encryption in apps is not a replacement for compartmentalization, dividing into cells, using codenames, etc.
No wonder why Turkish police have raided the offices of the national science research council... The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (Tubitak) research projects in universities and the private sector and employs more than 1,500 researchers...
Extreme security with your fingerprint . Your fingerprint encrypts your call. Use this application for secure communication. This application uses industry leading encryption techniques .. Super Secure Free Calls available
TFA states that the app author was listed as 'David Keynes of Beaverton, Oregon'. Looking at the text from the author's Wordpress site [2] and app description, one could possibly come to the conclusion that the author is not a native english speaker (or has substandard grammar skills). 'David Keynes' a non native english speaker? Putting that together with claims of 'Super Secure Free Calls'. Something doesn't add up here..
[1] https://apkpure.com/bylock-secure-chat-talk/net.client.by.lo...
[2] https://bylockapp.wordpress.com/