A few hours ago, at the same time that the Daily Mail was reporting that the Islamic State (ISIS) had released a new video of British hostage John Cantlie, some of our top-notch investigative reporters here at Selecting Stones were already downloading the video from a link located on yet another ISIS Twitter account. If it weren’t for the fact that the editorial offices of the Daily Mail have much, much faster Internet connections than those available to the scientific editors of Selecting Stones, then we would have been the first media outlet in the world to break the story. Missed opportunities can be hard to swallow, but oh well, let’s just blame Comcast and move on.
The video released late yesterday comes as Part 5 of the series, “Lend Me Your Ears: Messages from the British Detainee John Cantlie,” produced by ISIS’s own Al-Furqan Media. The series is exactly what one would expect it to be, a sequence of messages delivered by Cantlie on various topics. It should be noted that Cantlie appears to be reading from some kind of prompt for most of his narration, and so we obviously cannot know whether he himself is the author of these words. (But, to be fair to the caliph and his communications department, when can we know that of anyone?)
The main topic of Part 5 is the American and British governments’ refusal to negotiate with ISIS for the release of their citizens held by the Islamic State. While other European countries did negotiate for their citizens’ release from ISIS, the Americans and British did not.
Most of what Cantlie says on the topic is relatively well-known and accepted fact that has already been reported in mainstream Western media outlets. There are some extra details thrown in, though. For example, Cantlie implies that ISIS was seeking some kind of prisoner swap rather than a cash payment. He says, “For us, the Islamic State were asking for the release of Muslim prisoners, and their transfer to the caliphate. It sounded very complicated, but we were the biggest group from the biggest countries; there had to be a negotiation going on.”
Most interestingly, Cantlie reads from what he says are the transcripts of emails between ISIS and the families of American ISIS prisoners. The recurring theme in the selection of emails is the families’ frustration with the American government for not doing more to secure their loved ones’ release. Turning to the papers on the desk at which he is seated, Cantlie seems to go off script for a few moments, stumbling a bit as he says, “Now I have here a selection of emails between the Islamic State and families back home. I don’t have much on the British, so I assume that there was even less discussion going on for them, so this is really all about the Americans, and you’ll see that really the government was doing nothing, absolutely nothing, to help the families involved.”
Part 5 ends with a preview of Part 6. Cantile invites his viewers, “Join me in the next program as we learn about a failed rescue that tried to get us out. And you’ll hear about how one soldier was worth five prisoners, and we were worth none.” The camera then abruptly fades to black, and the video ends.
The web page from which Selecting Stones was able to obtain its copy of the latest John Cantlie video came courtesy of a link posted on an ISIS-affiliated Twitter account. It’s actually not very difficult at all to stay up to date on the latest from the ISIS media machine. Just use hashtag الدولة_الإسلامية# and see what you find. That’s presumably all that the State Department is doing, after all.
Although the work of ISIS’s social media experts is really much more humdrum than Wolf Blitzer and his ilk make it out to be, in this particular case, Selecting Stones was able to uncover something quite fascinating on the download page for the latest from John Cantlie. The video itself is simply an MP4 file, delivered to the world from the caliphate in the form of a 136-megabyte encrypted RAR archive. Decryption of the RAR file wasn’t much of a mystery because the ISIS media team simply put the text of the password on the download page. But what Selecting Stones investigators saw after the displayed password, further down the page, is much more interesting. It was this:
For those in the know (i.e., not the State Department), this text is a PGP public key. PGP in its various guises is the most common software used for personal encryption of data such as emails and files. Starting from this little clue, investigators from Selecting Stones have been able to get a look into the IT department of the Islamic State, and what they found is truly fascinating tale of intrigue, terror, and complete and utter dependence on Microsoft Windows and the Win32 API.
So, this is all we have on Part 5 of “Lend Me Your Ears,” and unfortunately we don’t have anything further to say at the moment on the computer software used by ISIS. However, the report on this latter topic is under preparation, so check back soon here at Selecting Stones to see our exclusive revelations. We promise that it will be way better than anything those dullards at the Daily Mail have uncovered about the Islamic State.
Also, we’d like to say in closing that we hope Mr. Cantlie somehow escapes his predicament with ISIS and doesn’t get beheaded in the process. The Islamic State, especially with its propensity for decapitation, demonstrates yet again why, as Chairman Mao rightly insisted, religion is poison.
