Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 125 posts

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

#41

Post by b112 »

bell-cot wrote: post #35
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…

2. ... friends of friends, or somebody posted his "joke" to a platform which GCHQ does real-time monitoring of, or ... 4. Compromised endpoint(s). (I also somewhat favor your #3.)

Yes, such as keyboard apps.

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

#43

Post by throwaway49849 »

chmod775 wrote: post #31

So these people do not want to talk about and are generally unable to provide examples of their surveillance stopping an actual threat because "they do not want to give away their capabilities", but when they get shown up for being absolute fools by taking an obvious joke seriously, they have no problem starting noisy court proceedings? They were likely just so giddy that they finally got something , they didn't stop…

The people that gravitate towards positions of unrestrained power often seem to have an authoritarian bend. If there's an opportunity to use their power to be a hero, that will scratch the itch, but in the absence of that opportunity, they seem to readily turn their power on the rest of us.

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

#45

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#46

Post by sitzkrieg »

misnome wrote: post #11
jackweirdy wrote: post #4

Not clear if it was message interception or (maybe more likely) Snapchat have their own moderation that can refer outward. The text is not e2e encrypted

Snapchat boast about having a small turnaround for threats that they proactively scan for and forward to law enforcement. There is no mystery or need for intelligence skullduggery here.

so in other words there is no e2e encryption?

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

#47

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

chmod775 wrote: post #31

So these people do not want to talk about and are generally unable to provide examples of their surveillance stopping an actual threat because "they do not want to give away their capabilities", but when they get shown up for being absolute fools by taking an obvious joke seriously, they have no problem starting noisy court proceedings? They were likely just so giddy that they finally got something , they didn't stop…

> but when they get shown up for being absolute fools by taking an obvious joke seriously, they have no problem starting noisy court proceedings

Those aren't the same people, though.

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

#48

Post by Zak »

krisoft wrote: post #23
_chu1 wrote: post #18

This is why even if you aren't doing anything wrong, you should always use E2E encrypted communication.

> 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.

Joking about bombs in a private conversation with six friends who know it's a joke is different from joking about bombs where others might overhear. The kind of person who posts on HN might assume Snapchat isn't really private, but most people would not.

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

#49

Post by ghaff »

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…

The almost real-time response is what makes it really hard to believe it was in response to some list of codewords that probably get mentioned in messages many thousands of times per day. (and which, as far as we know, has never triggered a response like this previously.) Someone shoulder surfing or a friend freaking out and calling see something/say something seems much more likely IMO.

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

#50

Post by AeroNotix »

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…

> 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.

Reminds me of whenever I used to phone a friend during my teenage years I would always start with "BOMB QUEEN, BOMB QUEEN."

Post reply on HN