FBI's ability to legally access secure messaging app content and metadata [pdf]

Post by rzz3 » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 7:32 AM UTC

ichydkrsrnae wrote: post #256

b8 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ulbricht was caught via poor OPSEC and not via a Firefox/Tor 0day afaik. Though there was/is speculation that a Firefox/Tor 0day was used to bring down some Tor markets and possibly to locate the Silk Road's server. Silk Road 2.0 was brought down in like a few months, which could indicate such a 0day existed. Or that it was ran by some former Silk Road staff members who got doxed when Silk Road 1.0 was shut down.

Ulbricht was caught because an FBI agent, who would read things slowly and twice, recognized these 4 letters : heyy . That's how Ulbricht sometimes spelled hey , and the agent had seen that particular spelling before in his investigation, in an email from Ulbrict’s student email address. Nick Bilton's book “American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road” is a great read, highly recom…

Post by raxxorrax » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 7:51 AM UTC

Eelongate wrote: post #270

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's (scarily) interesting that they react with actual personal attendance based purely on a very limited set of electronic information. From your further description: > We are not religious (at all). We do not attend church, synagogue or mosque. We are lower middle class white Americans born and raised in the USA and have never traveled outside the country. Would not the FBI have been able to any amount of backgroun…

I think what he experienced is another manifestation of the same phenomena as zero-tolerance policies in schools; institutions ask their enforcers to suspend common sense and strictly enforce the letter of the law/guideline/etc, even in situations where any reasonable person would decide it made no sense. They do this because such common sense and gut feelings is how bias and prejudice might creep into their oh-so-pe…

Post by ichydkrsrnae » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 7:54 AM UTC

rzz3 wrote: post #351

ichydkrsrnae wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ulbricht was caught because an FBI agent, who would read things slowly and twice, recognized these 4 letters : heyy . That's how Ulbricht sometimes spelled hey , and the agent had seen that particular spelling before in his investigation, in an email from Ulbrict’s student email address. Nick Bilton's book “American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road” is a great read, highly recom…

Wtf, who doesn’t add extra y’s to hey sometimes? That wasn’t evidence.

Post by CyanBird » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 8:00 AM UTC

adamfisk wrote: post #288

CyanBird wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from the government while fulfilling missions with extraordinary humanitarian benefits Ahh yes, the famed operation Condor, operation Gladio, operation iceberg and so many other famed "humanitarian" projects At the end of the day all that you mentioned goes back to a post-facto "it is good because *we* do it", I would go to say that most people here in HN are well aware of the start of Google when it was funded by…

I’m certainly not defending all US government actions. That’s exactly the point. Levine tries to lump all of this in with surveillance. The US government funds the NSA, that is true. It also funds food stamps. And torture. The trick is to untangle it.

Post by Andrew_nenakhov » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 8:08 AM UTC

marcan_42 wrote: post #325

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they provide near-instant full text search on server side if the chats are "encrypted at rest"?

Encrypted at rest means the data is encrypted as stored on disk, not that they do not have access to the keys. That would be end-to-end encryption. What Telegram claims to have done is set this up in a way that makes it very hard for a single party/state to get these keys. It's not possible to make this completely impossible (if you have a server processing user data, it will have the keys loaded at some point, and t…