301–310 of 361 posts
I wonder how much crime would be left if the drug trade were legalized
Black markets exist and are extensive for products that are available through legal means.
It's not common, and not very profitable.
So the big question is if would have been better to strike fast, silently gain more intel och strike in some kind of statistical analysis maner to not blow their cover á la Alan Turing and the enigma
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is covering it in more detail than the Reuters article, including some of the mechanics of how it was pulled off: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-08/fbi-afp-underworld-cr... Apparently it revolved around duping Hakan Ayik, one of Australia's most wanted drug dealers now operating as an international kingpin from Turkey, to trust the app and recommend it to his associates. I…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So they got to this most wanted man and instead of arresting him they fed him an app to help catch all his buddies while at the same time put a target on his back? Pretty daring move.
It seems like kind of an evil move for law enforcement to put a target on his back like that. But I assume all of the bad guys knew which guy was pushing the phones, so he was probably going to be a target no matter what.
This is actually a very old method of getting criminals to cooperate with law enforcement.
The FBI used to do this with mob guys all the time in the 1980's. Show up, arrest them publicly, put out false newspaper articles saying he was close to flipping. He starts getting heat from the outfit and sooner or later, distrust is sown and suddenly he becomes a marked man. Word gets back to him they put a hit on him, or things get dicey with the underbosses and suddenly, he's like a cat in a cage with nowhere to go - so he turns on his associates in order to save his own life.
Cops used to do the same thing with low level drug dealers. Pressure them to flip on their supplier by pseudo arresting them, taking him away. They'd drive around a bit, then drop him off without cuffs in the middle of the neighborhood in broad daylight. Word gets around what happened, and suddenly the heat gets turned up because now he was seen getting out of a cop car with no cuffs? Must mean he's turned informant. Same thing, he gets too much heat and feels he needs to save himself and flips anyways.
This is how police should get around the problems presented with encryption. This is real policing. The PR barrage and faux posturing by the FBI to weaken encryption has always seemed like just lazy policing to me. If anything, the hacking attacks on industrial centers has better illustrated than anything why encryption is necessary, and this new triumph has demonstrated that police can continue to function, even thr…
By adding a backdoor to E2E encryption? That is pretty much what they have been asking for :)
Amazing that criminals still pick some unknown device over an existing solution with a proven track record.
This is not the first time something like this has happened:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like kind of an evil move for law enforcement to put a target on his back like that. But I assume all of the bad guys knew which guy was pushing the phones, so he was probably going to be a target no matter what.
>> It seems like kind of an evil move for law enforcement to put a target on his back like that. This is actually a very old method of getting criminals to cooperate with law enforcement. The FBI used to do this with mob guys all the time in the 1980's. Show up, arrest them publicly, put out false newspaper articles saying he was close to flipping. He starts getting heat from the outfit and sooner or later, distrust…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> It seems like kind of an evil move for law enforcement to put a target on his back like that. This is actually a very old method of getting criminals to cooperate with law enforcement. The FBI used to do this with mob guys all the time in the 1980's. Show up, arrest them publicly, put out false newspaper articles saying he was close to flipping. He starts getting heat from the outfit and sooner or later, distrust…
Fun.. I guess that's one way to figure out if someone is guilty or not. Either he's innocent and nothing happens or he's guilty and he dies or flips. The whole side stepping the judge/jury to go straight to the executioner part seems like it should violate some kind of law.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Russia and China would in fact be a better solution as most Westerners are never going to be subject to Russian or Chinese authorities.
Sure until you visit a geopolitically aligned airport and get detained and propositioned by a foreign intelligence agency. Then you end up spying against your own country because your VPN provider was just a honeypot for a foreign intelligence agency. Blackmail, forced detention, "crimes against the Chinese state", jail without due process or civil rights, who knows. Maybe you didn't even break US law but Chinese or…
What we've learned is only what was in Austrlia's piece of the cake, given they started their day already. New Zeland had theirs already, too. I imagine thousands of arrests are still happening worldwide and several press conferences are going to be held today. Looking at the seal of the operation ( https://www.anom.io/trojan_shield_seal.jpg ), following countries participated in the operation: Canada, Australia, US,…
> I expect this to be bigger than Panama Papers. Way bigger. I expect a few prominent politicians to be soon either arrested or "convinced" to step down. I highly doubt it. The main drug operations run with state approval. If anything this was just an attempt to either clean the country from competition or just keep law enforcement busy. If you read the reports, what they have collected, this is nothing if you compar…
I saw this. Watched the whole Europol conference. Those numbers are indeed low: 9 tons of cocain, 5 tons of cannabis/hashish. Some guns and 15m USD, if I remember correctly.
I still don't think I exaggerated. There's no way that's all they got from it after 3 years of eavesdropping. There's just no way that those tens of thousands of messages only incriminated some drug lords. What they did with these press conferences was a pure PR, they just wanted something for the press, but I still believe that the actual aftermath of this will much larger.