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British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

reuters.com

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Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#101

Post by homefree »

vhguru wrote: post #63
clawoo wrote: post #22

One needs to ask themselves, what is more likely? 1. The /feds/ broke Snapschat's end to end encryption and they're monitoring for all traffic with designated stopwords, or... 2. One of his friends reported him, one way or another, or.. 3. Snapchat's end to end encryption is... not. I can't find any definitive statement that the chat messages themselves are E2EE, only that photos and videos are encrypted and the key…

Group chats generally don’t have E2EE. Most apps provide that only for one-to-one conversations. Group E2E encryption is a difficult problem.

I think signal/OTR has e2ee support for pretty large groups.

The kid was using airport wifi for this right? I'd guess public airport wifi installs some backdoored SSL cert and is generally monitored (and you probably agree to this ToS when you use it) - you may even agree to not make jokes about planes - I wouldn't be surprised.

Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#102

Post by Aerbil313 »

This is absolutely hilarious. I myself made multiple jokes over the years on plain unencrypted cell phone with my friends, knowing full well that it’s very likely all conversations are listened to with (probably) STT and regexes, but I always thought that my country’s intelligence service has the competence to distinguish a joke from the real deal.

Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#103

Post by yellow_lead »

realfeel78 wrote: post #98

OP title is not backed up by linked article whatsoever. The article says nothing at all to that effect. The article says this, however, which I don't really understand: > He suggested one of the chat's other members could have warned the police, but if that were the case, that other member would have to be charged, not Verma. Can anyone help explain this?

I believe the part you are asking about means: Verma did not make a threat, but a private joke in a group chat, so he's not liable for the police reaction. If his friend is the one who informed the police, while knowing it was a joke, the friend should be charged instead.

Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#104

Post by Aerbil313 »

jp42 wrote: post #55

Recently read The Making of Atomic Bomb & Skunkworks. Govt puts enormous amount of money & employees best people in given area to achieve their objectives. It's hard for me to imagine govt will be ok to have tech that they can't crack, they will find a way to crack. I am not saying we should be OK with it, but I don't see a path to make it happen. It can be made difficult with E2E and other tech but not impossible.

It’s mathematically impossible to crack the technology of E2EE. But govts have all the power to coerce the companies into not using E2EE at all times and to lie that they do.

Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#105

Post by udev4096 »

chatmasta wrote: post #19
Daviey wrote: post #16

It's an /assumption/ that British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages, as the article literally states, "The trial did not make clear how the British services managed to have access to Verma's private messages, the judge stressed." The truth is, it isn't public knowledge how this unfolded and anything suggesting otherwise is conjecture. Also, this post doesn't' reflect the article title, "Spa…

If we're speculating, a much more likely explanation is that Snapchat moderation teams monitor certain words in certain areas, flagging for example any message containing "bomb" sent from an airport. This is arguably even creepier than government surveillance, since it implies Snapchat employees are looking at the content of private chats and the user may never know.

I'm surprised the amount of trust you put in Snapchat and likewise companies whose sole purpose is to maximize their profit by selling user data

Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#106

Post by dang »

The submitted title broke the HN guidelines badly. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

(Normally we'd revert the title, but the comments in this thread have been so skewed by submitted title that the thread won't make sense anymore if I do that.)

Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#108

Post by itishappy »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #68
krisoft wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even if you aren't doing anything wrong I mean... joking about bomb threats at an airport is not "not doing anything wrong". Should we throw the person in prison for it? No, of course not. Is it a dumb thing to do? I think so. Very dumb. > you should always use E2E encrypted communication I agree with that.

I had a gate agent joke about needing to check a replacement plane for bombs before we can board. She said it over the intercom and then said "I probably can't joke about that at an airport." There was a lot of laughter and it made me far less annoyed about the delay. It was hilarious.

The situations are not equal.

"We are checking the plane for bombs" cannot be interpreted as a threat. If it were to be misunderstood as serious, it would indicate an abundance of caution by the airline.

"I am going to blow up a plane" sure can. If it were to be misunderstood as serious, it would indicate an immediate threat to the health and safety of hundreds of people.

Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#109

Post by croemer »

archsurface wrote: post #37

I think "Intelligence" was used in the name at a time when spying was done on foreign countries. If the spying is now done on the domestic general public it seems we should change the name to something more appropriate.

Domestic intelligence...

Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#110

Post by implements »

CryptoBanker wrote: post #88
implements wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most likely Snapchat's E2EE is just a facade, they probably have a dictionary of "funny" words on the device (and/or the server) and automatically flags the message in the internal systems when certain stopwords are being used. On device content scanning notifies Snapchat of a certain type of threat, that + metadata goes to a real-time law-enforcement system which combines it with other sources to decide whether a…

On device scanning would be reasonable? What happened when everybody was up in arms about Apple wanting to do on device scanning for child porn?

Well - it’s reasonable for a government to seek to stop absolute privacy subverting the prevention and detection of crime … I think, so a state has to find some way to be able to construct reasonable suspicion and then lawful search on routine internet activity. (Opinions vary, obviously)
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