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‘Every message was copied to the police’

theguardian.com

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Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’

#81

Post by giantg2 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #44
jimt1234 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall reading a while back that judges were signing off on surveillance warrants based on messages using any sort of encryption (like https), because obviously anyone encrypting a message is up to no-good. /s ;)

> based on messages using any sort of encryption (like https) I hope you're strongly /s, because if HTTPS being used as transport is enough to rubber-stamp a warrant, then this is in practice a blanket agreement to surveil all communications on the Internet.

Most approvals are basically rubber stamps. Judges usually just believe whatever law enforcement tells them. Most of the time they spend no time digging into it. Just my experience.

Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’

#82

Post by dredmorbius »

eptcyka wrote: post #49
bitwize wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fire, judiciously applied, can erase paper trails rather efficiently.

And evidence of burning possibly indicting evidence is all the more indicting.

This is what document-retention-and-disposal policies are for.

In major business districts throughout the Western world, document disposal companies will drive their collection truck to a given business address and shred the collected paper right there in the street as it's loaded into the truck.

You can see them everywhere.

You can hear them long before you see them.

Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’

#83

Post by neither_color »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #15

> Every single message sent on the app since its launch in 2018 – 19.37m of them – had been collected, and many of them read by the Australian federal police (AFP) who, together with the FBI, had conceived, built, marketed and sold the devices. I wonder how many crypto currency tumblers are actually run by law enforcement?

That and VPN services. Cheap and easy to deploy and run, are mostly marketed towards people who want to hide their online activity. Not saying all VPN providers are like this or that there aren't legitimate reasons to use them, just saying that they'd make a good honeypot.

Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’

#84

Post by giantg2 »

literallyaduck wrote: post #74

Now invoke consumer protections acts against both agencies for fraudulent advertising, and wiretapping the 93% of communication not related to criminal activities.

If they used a user agreement similar to most in the industry (we make the rules and can change them at any time without notice), then it's probably all legal. Sadly.

Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’

#85

Post by dredmorbius »

hkt wrote: post #10
bitwize wrote: post #2

> Now that the workings have been revealed, An0m is a trick that could surely never be repeated in the world of organised crime. The revelations will push criminals away from technology, even if it makes their work more laborious and slow-moving. I can imagine future organized crime information flows more closely resembling what was depicted in John Wick: a lot of secretaries and file clerks pushing paper around, usi…

Not unlike the FSB: https://www.rt.com/news/typewriters-russia-order-surveillanc...

Curiously, a similar organisation would bug same.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210730214414/https://spectrum....

https://archive.is/T16Fj

(GDPR-noncompliant cookie policy at origin.)

Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’

#87

Post by rkk3 »

codetrotter wrote: post #77
rkk3 wrote: post #67

> the FBI, had conceived, built, marketed and sold the devices. > $1,700 for the handset, with a $1,250 annual subscription > Almost 10,000 users around the world had agreed to pay So the FBI built a 8 figure ARR hardware business...

But they probably had a lot of money to start it right?

The FBI sure, but who knows what kind of budget the team was given.

But they did leverage their position as law enforcement to arrest all of their competitors

Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’

#88

Post by giantg2 »

icu wrote: post #16

The striking thing is that criminal enterprise relies on software as much as any other legitimate business. The adage "software is eating the world" comes to mind. It's probably the case that more technically adept criminals will roll their own tech and out manoeuvre rival criminals and law enforcement. Considering the sums of money discussed in the article it's not inconceivable for criminal organisations to start c…

The best solutions are to go low tech. Enforcement models and staffing is reliant on electronic technology. Many enforcement organizations are poorly equipted to handle well implemented physical systems.

Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’

#89

Post by isoprophlex »

notyourday wrote: post #64
isoprophlex wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use one time pads

If you have a way to security distribute one time pads you don't actually need one time pads as you have a way to security distribute the messages as the one time pads are higher than the size of the messages you are distributing.

Nevertheless you can distribute your pad once and communicate over clear channels for a long time.

You might even schedule regular communications to avoid being caught by traffic metadata analysis.

Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’

#90

Post by dredmorbius »

Y_Y wrote: post #38
Buttons840 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not both? Encrypt your message with your home grown encryption, then send it through standard TLS. Both would have to fail for the message to be revealed. Sometimes when I'm wearing my tinfoil hat I wonder if the advice to avoid rolling your own crypto is a conspiracy. The powers that be want to maintain their backdoors, maybe? Probably not. Of course, it's definitely true that there are more attack vectors out t…

I think that this isn't strictly true. If you naïvely apply bad encryption before good you may weaken the entire system. For a silly example, imagine your "homegrown" crypto adds a publicly known plaintext to the start of the cyphertext. I think this is discussed in Schneier's textbook.

Or the implementation does something silly like copy the cleartext and not clean up after itself, or send distinguishing metadata, etc., etc.
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