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Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

lbc.co.uk

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Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

#121

Post by kelipso »

michaelt wrote: post #105
oa335 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ukraine does it to avoid assisting Russian damage assessment and targeting efforts. Isn’t UAE doing this to avoid Iranian damage assessment and targeting efforts also?

The censorship is dual purpose. They want to make it so Iran doesn’t know if they successfully hit that Oracle data centre. But they also want to make it so foreign investors don’t get scared off by the prospect of their data centre getting blown up. Obviously investors will avoid the area so long as missiles are flying - but by coming through the conflict "unscathed" will let them bounce back fast. Likewise with tou…

Isn’t Ukraine’s censorship dual purpose as well?

They are more likely to get funding from EU if they can make it look like they can win the war.

Which of these is the bigger motivation? Hard to say. But I gather most drones have cameras, so I imagine Russia has a pretty good idea of where their drones are striking.

Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

#122

Post by lazide »

jordanb wrote: post #88
schiffern wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest and shared OTOH, anyone remember "loose lips sink ships?" Beyond the famous poster, it was backed up by robust censorship laws.[0][1] You might say it's different since we were at war, but this ignores how the threat model and immediacy is very different in the UAE vs here in the (geographically well protected/isolated) US. Battle damage assessment,…

Loose Lips Sink Ships was itself an information management scheme to avoid informing the public. The Germans didn't have spies collecting rumors in the US. Nor did they need them during Operation Drumbeat (the U-Boat attack on the US coast). The US was completely unprepared for Drumbeat. They had no harbor defenses, no convoys, inadequate and unprepared coastwatcher and patrol services. The point of the censorship is…

Germany not only had spies, there were multiple (albeit failed/foiled) sabotage attempts by Germany on US soil.

Part of the issue the US had is the very large (significant percent of the population) 1st gen German immigrant population. There were concerns they would sympathize.

What was actually happening is many of these immigrants were there to get away from Hitler and Germany as it was at the time, so Germany found most of its attempts stymied instead. But they did try.

Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

#123

Post by arduanika »

Zak wrote: post #118
arduanika wrote: post #65

> The UAE government owns majority holdings in telecom companies Etisalat and Du. This gives security services the power to observe all communications on their networks. > The Arab state has also used the Israeli-developed software Pegasus which allows agents to listen into private calls and read messages, even if they are shared on encrypted apps like WhatsApp,. This seems to be the key part from a tech standpoint.…

> Does Pegasus help governments read messages from Telegram? Signal? Yes. It attempts privilege escalation and exfiltrates whatever message contents it can from multiple apps. Signal has some potential resistance to that since messages are encrypted in transit and at rest. The easiest weak link would be displaying message content in notifications, which is optional in Signal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(sp…

Interesting, thanks. I guess I'll carry on feeling marginally superior for choosing Signal over the others as my default, while remaining bleak about the overall landscape.

Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

#124

Post by jordanb »

Legend2440 wrote: post #119
jordanb wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loose Lips Sink Ships was itself an information management scheme to avoid informing the public. The Germans didn't have spies collecting rumors in the US. Nor did they need them during Operation Drumbeat (the U-Boat attack on the US coast). The US was completely unprepared for Drumbeat. They had no harbor defenses, no convoys, inadequate and unprepared coastwatcher and patrol services. The point of the censorship is…

>The Germans didn't have spies collecting rumors in the US. Yes they did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duquesne_Spy_Ring

This ring was broken up before the US was even in the war. Operation Drumbeat began after the Pearl Harbor attack at the end of 1941 but was most intense in early 1942. There was lots of Bund activity in the 1930s and prior to Pearl Harbor but very little afterwards.

But also, even if there were Bund spies in American ports was unnecessary and unable to provide tactical information to the German U-boats. Unable due to practical limitations of communication. Unnecessary because the US was so ill-equipped for the battle. For instance, the Bund wouldn't have been able to report on the movement of convoys because there were no convoys.

The US still had charted aids to navigation light up, and cities weren't blacked out allowing the submarines to sit off the coast and see US ships silhouetted against the city skyline behind them. A German submarine sailed into New York harbor using a tourist map as a chart!

Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

#125

Post by righthand »

unethical_ban wrote: post #102
righthand wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s weird that the notification backdoor never gets talked about, but your Whatsapp messages are decrypted in plain sight when the text content is shipped through the notification services. This is mentioned always for Signal but Whatsapp always gets a pass even though it’s a way more malicious company and indeed probably using that hole to profile/track it’s users. The only response is “oh no Whatsapp cant leak any…

Signal got called out for it because it actually happened to a user with the police. Of course it affects all apps. It's also local, so irrelevant to the discussion of networked/encryption hacks someone alleged above.

My point is that we simply don’t know what the police mean by “broke encryption”. It could be they are able Mitm the notifications server not that they’ve broken the whatsapp double ratchet.

Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

#126

Post by notahacker »

gerikson wrote: post #31
skywal_l wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that they did not "publish" the picture. They shared it in a private group. This is 1984 kind of stuff. This will hurt Dubai's brand way more than any kinetic attack from Iran.

Dubai's brand (before the war) was "you're welcome to come here to make money, but criticize the government and you're out". I'm sure there's a ton of young influencers who don't know the first thing about the place to not have internalized it, but I remember a spate of articles and books about 15 years ago of Westerners falling afoul of the local laws and losing everything.

Yeah, tbh people not scared by stories of people as wealthy and white and Western as then being prosecuted for kissing their unmarried opposite sex partner on the beach or falling out with the wrong person are not going to be worried about how wartime paranoia interacts with airline employees

Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

#127

Post by [deleted] »

netdur wrote: post #8
Someone1234 wrote: post #3

> publishing information deemed harmful to state interests Is the charge, which I think kind of speaks for itself. Full on: "You embarrassed us, straight to jail." In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest and shared by the media then we'd reflect on if our routing is safe/correct and make proportional changes for safety. Not a big deal, nobody is fired, life moves on. I feel like actions li…

there are two sides, such as how photos can stress citizens and act as propaganda, making them harmful to state interests, ultimately it is their country and their rules, not yours, regardless of how much you disagree with it you are also missing the elephant in the room, whatsapp's claim of end-to-end encryption is a lie

[deleted]

Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

#128

Post by Marsymars »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #11

> Radha Stirling, chief executive of London-based advocacy group Detained in Dubai, said Dubai police had "explicitly confirmed they are conducting electronic surveillance operations capable of detecting private WhatsApp messages." Whoa.

To be fair, an operation where you encourage people in group chats to report and share anything suspicious with police would be consistent with "electronic surveillance operations capable of detecting private WhatsApp messages."

Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

#129

Post by rightbyte »

dralley wrote: post #41
pydry wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Ukraine does it to avoid assisting Russian damage assessment and targeting efforts. Avoiding embarrassment is not really part of the equation, especially when they need to push for more international support.

"Avoid embarrassment" is very much why you quench public discourse.

Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

#130

Post by aunty_helen »

felixg3 wrote: post #95
aunty_helen wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emirates has never had a passenger fatality. What do you mean worse safety?

Probably referring to crew rest hours (esp. a problem in the late 2010s, near-misses at DXB etc. Not having had passenger fatalities is a bad indicator for safety records in the 21st century. The ek521 report is a good example documenting systemic failures at EK

Well, if not ever having a fatality isn’t good enough, they’re consistently top 10 rated for safety. I just don’t buy ops criticism. It’s fine to not like Dubai, but emirates are provably one of the best airlines.
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