Each time I read about this I'm a bit underwhelmed by the number of arrests. Tens of thousands of users, presumably almost all of them criminals, and only 600 arrests? That's a very leaky sieve.
‘Every message was copied to the police’
151–160 of 193 posts
Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. I've met multiple cocaine users
Don't care for drugs or sex work, for all I care they should be legal. What is horrifying to me is the amount of violence / abuse amounting not only to slavery and trafficking but also the murders of the innocent these people commit. Should they be left unchecked, to flourish? Look at countries where criminal activity has gone up severely, thinking of drug cartels in Mexico for one (or other places) where normal peop…
To be frank, I think the most parsimonious theory for why these trades involve so much violence is because we've made them black markets and forced the entities that successfully operate in those trades to be equipped to contend with increasingly military-like police forces, as well as incentivized to be secretive in their dealings, removing the reputational and regulatory pressures that many other industries are subject to, and giving them reason to harm people more often
But even if criminalization isn't creating these problems, it certainly is doing nothing to solve them, and making it harder for anyone who's found themselves involved in these activities to seek out help from more above-board sources (Including the police themselves, but also for example medical practitioners, who might report them to the police)
And of course this all leaves aside the philosophical objection I have to hunting people down and putting them in cages, not because they've harmed people, but because we think maybe something else they're doing is associated with that harmful behavior in many instances. This is just not something I can get behind
But at the end of the day, all of this pales in comparison to the systemic consequences of creating a powerful police state that has license to surveil and invade people's homes, confiscate their property, or even gun them down because of suspicion about contraband. This social cost is more than I would pay for murder investigations, let alone controlling what substances people can ingest or what motivations they have for their sex lives
Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’
#153Gee, what if there was an industry standard simple to implement cryptographic messaging protocol (unlike PGP).
That is to say, there is never a good solution to this basic problem which should have been solved 30 years ago, on top of having to convince your mob boss on what to use.
Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’
#154The 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…
one fun factoid in favor of your argument is that Latin American drug cartels have been known to build their own submarines for drug smuggling. however, most known criminal dev teams are hacker groups in Russia who either operate as part of official espionage activities, or are allowed to operate as long as their victims aren't Russian. all that being said, though, this "criminal software" idea probably isn't as true…
> most known criminal dev teams are hacker groups in Russia
citation, please!
Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’
#155This just goes to show that you can't trust any messaging app or phone to be "secure".
Imagine if there was a small handheld device that you could type messages into (along with a secret phrase or a private key), and it would spit out a string of encrypted text that could be entered into ANY messaging app (or even published publicly on a billboard if you wanted). You could even encode the encrypted text as a scannable QR code if you wanted.
On the receiving side of things, the decrypter device could have a camera that could read QR codes (or maybe OCR an encrypted string of text). The most basic solution would be to type the entire encrypted string of text into the box and then enter the secret pass phrase or key to decrypt it.
The point, however, is that the encryption and decryption HAVE to be done on a separate hardware device that is air-gapped and does NOT have internet access in any way.
Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
They arrested their customer, which isn’t great for retention.
Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Penalisation under a "KYC" law would have to be extreme. And I suspect there'd be all kinds of challenges to such a requirement. Again, the Good Sam loophole is huge.
> Penalisation under a "KYC" law would have to be extreme. Yep. It would have to be enacted in the kind of furvor like existed around 9/11. But, the PATRIOT act had been floating around DC for years before 9/11 too. > And I suspect there'd be all kinds of challenges to such a requirement. > Again, the Good Sam loophole is huge. In the US, it really isn't. It's a patchwork of state and local laws that could absolutely…
By "huge" I mean that the plausible set of circumstances in which someone loaned out a phone for a call is large.
It's one thing to put leverage on the already marginal. Another to haul upstanding citizens off for offering a stranger a phone call. Resistance would be huge. No matter how weak any perceived legal shield would be.
Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you’re using a true random number generator that works on a mechanical/electrical process a lot of encryption algorithms are various ways of creating a one-time pad. And they save a lot on space which used to be precious. With a single key much smaller than a megabyte I can encrypt essentially endlessly where for the normal OTP process I need as much random data as there is data to be encrypted which gets unwi…
> Unless you’re using a true random number generator that works on a mechanical/electrical process… …you're not using a one-time pad. OTP requires the pad to be truly random: at least one bit of unique, never-used-elsewhere entropy for every bit in the message. Merely XORing some plaintext with a pseudo-random stream based on a smaller seed, which as you say is the basis for various other encryption algorithms, is no…
Which is why it seems like there should at least be an RFC for OTP communication - if there's a small group that wants to communicate securely together, it may be worth their time and effort to share that pad securely. Right now, there's no official standard for that.
Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course, but there would be similar market validation for being able to hold up a bank without ever being recognized or to be able to steal money from bank accounts anonymously. That 'market' is called crime, and obviously criminals will be more than happy to fork over money for tools that help them to commit crimes without being arrested. In reality though, that market doesn't exist because if you or I would addre…
There are more reasons then committing a crime for wanting anonymity. If I was someone with money like a celebrity I would want this phone. If I was a business with sensitive information I would want this phone. And so on.
Further down the article, when talking about the project history, it notes that the company that inspired An0m, Phantom Secure, ostensibly started selling heavily-locked-down BlackBerry phones for this audience.
They quickly found their primary market was, well... crime.