Since when are Snapchat messages private?
British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages
81–90 of 125 posts
Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages
#82The MOD encourages their personnel to use Snapchat, and blocks WhatsApp (on their internal networks).
What more do you need to know?
Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Group chats generally don’t have E2EE. Most apps provide that only for one-to-one conversations. Group E2E encryption is a difficult problem.
> Group E2E encryption is a difficult problem. Not if it was architected properly from the beginning.
Nah the best you could do for a long while was just to have n^2 bilateral encryption sessions that behave like a group channel. Only fairly recently was a workable construction for doing many-party encryption sessions actually developed, called TreeKEM, and is now standardized in the IETF MLS standard. This is literally bleeding edge cryptography.
It's an extremely flexible design and has relatively few constraints in how it can be used in a larger system, but it's just extremely new.
The ART construction exited a few years ealier than TreeKEM but that's a weaker design with more restrictions so it wasn't adopted very widely afaik.
Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages
#84There is no way British intelligence could have acted so quick, if it was true. Maybe if he/they were already being watched. This is an interesting theory, if it's technically possible would be it. For sure airports would watch such traffic if they technically can. "It was previously thought the WiFi network at London Gatwick Airport could have intercepted it, but an airport spokesperson told the BBC it didn't have t…
The WiFi network in one of the London airports had this weird phone time error when connecting, it wanted to update time definitions, I always wondered if it's had to do with certificate validation, or just a simple misconfiguration, or even if it was just my personal device.
Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages
#85With every ounce of privacy given up, each person-hour spent waiting in a security line at the airport, and each incident like this, the bad guys win a little bit more. The cultural shift wreaked in the aftermath is something I rarely see measured and weighed.
Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages
#86One 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.
You're not wrong.
I've implemented E2EE in group chats using Olm/Megolm and it's not easy to scale and comes with a ton of limitations.
If I was running Snapchat, I wouldn't see the point in dedicating that many resources and infrastructure to it.
Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages
#87So 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 nerve they have to try and make the victim pay damages too? "We messed up, send the Spanish authorities to scramble a jet to escort the flight, but he should pay for that" The balls on these guys.
Who is the "We" in "We messed up" here?
Presumably, the "We" is British intelligence, but it's Spanish prosecutors that were asking for the kid to reimburse the Spanish government for the cost of scrambling the fighter jet.
Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages
#88One 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. 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?
Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A man's urge to be a Hero and save the day, and a bureaucrat's fear of losing reputation are a deadly cocktail.
That's a great statement. DDG seems to think you came up with it. Is that so?
Thank goodness I'm not inebriated near an all-night tattoo parlor.
Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages
#90So 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…
At least in the US a lot of the surveillance is probably illegal and cannot be used in court. They way they get around this is parallel construction. [1] Reuters had an awesome article about this a long time ago, which seems to have been removed from their site. [2] The NSA or whoever spies on somebody they're not supposed to be spying on. They see he's e.g. selling drugs, and further spying shows the time of a sell.…
> Reuters had an awesome article about this a long time ago, which seems to have been removed from their site. [2]
It seems the link stopped working some time in the past 2 weeks or so.