'Every Message Was Copied to the Police': the Daring Sting Behind the An0m Phone (theguardian.com) 105
The Guardian tells the story of "a viral sensation in the global underworld," the high-security An0m phones, which launched with "a grassroots marketing campaign, identifying so-called influencers — 'well-known crime figures who wield significant power and influence over other criminal associates', according to a US indictment — within criminal subcultures."
An0m could not be bought in a shop or on a website. You had to first know a guy. Then you had to be prepared to pay the astronomical cost: $1,700 for the handset, with a $1,250 annual subscription, an astonishing price for a phone that was unable to make phone calls or browse the internet.
Almost 10,000 users around the world had agreed to pay, not for the phone so much as for a specific application installed on it. Opening the phone's calculator allowed users to enter a sum that functioned as a kind of numeric open sesame to launch a secret messaging application. The people selling the phone claimed that An0m was the most secure messaging service in the world. Not only was every message encrypted so that it could not be read by a digital eavesdropper, it could be received only by another An0m phone user, forming a closed loop system entirely separate from the information speedways along which most text messages travel. Moreover, An0m could not be downloaded from any of the usual app stores. The only way to access it was to buy a phone with the software preinstalled...
[U]sers could set an option to wipe the phone's data if the device went offline for a specified amount of time. Users could also set especially sensitive messages to self-erase after opening, and could record and send voice memos in which the phone would automatically disguise the speaker's voice. An0m was marketed and sold not so much to the security conscious as the security paranoid...
An0m was not, however, a secure phone app at all. Every single message sent on the app since its launch in 2018 — 19.37m of them — had been collected, and many of them read by the Australian federal police (AFP) who, together with the FBI, had conceived, built, marketed and sold the devices.
On 7 June 2021, more than 800 arrests were made around the world....
Law enforcement agencies ultimately saw An0m as a creative workaround for unbreakable encryption, according to the Guardian. "Why debate tech companies on privacy issues through costly legal battles if you can simply trick criminals into using your own monitored network?"
The Guradian's story was shared by jd (Slashdot user #1,658), who sees an ethical question. "As the article notes, what's to stop a tyrant doing the same against rivals or innocent protestors?"
Almost 10,000 users around the world had agreed to pay, not for the phone so much as for a specific application installed on it. Opening the phone's calculator allowed users to enter a sum that functioned as a kind of numeric open sesame to launch a secret messaging application. The people selling the phone claimed that An0m was the most secure messaging service in the world. Not only was every message encrypted so that it could not be read by a digital eavesdropper, it could be received only by another An0m phone user, forming a closed loop system entirely separate from the information speedways along which most text messages travel. Moreover, An0m could not be downloaded from any of the usual app stores. The only way to access it was to buy a phone with the software preinstalled...
[U]sers could set an option to wipe the phone's data if the device went offline for a specified amount of time. Users could also set especially sensitive messages to self-erase after opening, and could record and send voice memos in which the phone would automatically disguise the speaker's voice. An0m was marketed and sold not so much to the security conscious as the security paranoid...
An0m was not, however, a secure phone app at all. Every single message sent on the app since its launch in 2018 — 19.37m of them — had been collected, and many of them read by the Australian federal police (AFP) who, together with the FBI, had conceived, built, marketed and sold the devices.
On 7 June 2021, more than 800 arrests were made around the world....
Law enforcement agencies ultimately saw An0m as a creative workaround for unbreakable encryption, according to the Guardian. "Why debate tech companies on privacy issues through costly legal battles if you can simply trick criminals into using your own monitored network?"
The Guradian's story was shared by jd (Slashdot user #1,658), who sees an ethical question. "As the article notes, what's to stop a tyrant doing the same against rivals or innocent protestors?"
"entrapment" (Score:2)
With regards to the hand-wringing worry about the possibility that some tyrant might do something similar, my response is a big, loud, echoing "meh". Tyrants maintain their power through the use of cell phones, the internet, antibiotics, automobiles, paper and pencils, eyeglasses, wheelbarrows and sharpened sticks. If we refused to develo
Re:"entrapment" (Score:5, Informative)
It's not entrapment.
Entrapment is when the pigs propose to someone to transport coke for a fee, then arrest them for drug smuggling. It's entrapment because that person might never have been tempted to smuggle drugs if the pigs hadn't planted the idea in their nogging and made it an attractive proposition.
Here they sold phones to individuals who were criminals to begin with. The secure phone didn't turn them into criminals, nor did it cause them to engage in new criminal activities they wouldn't have engaged in otherwise.
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Here they sold phones to individuals who were criminals to begin with.
Okay, fair enough.
The secure phone didn't turn them into criminals, nor did it cause them to engage in new criminal activities they wouldn't have engaged in otherwise.
Ehh, that seems debatable in my opinion.
If you take a guy who wants to steal stuff, but doesn't have any tools to pull it off, maybe he won't do it. If you hand him the keys to the backdoor of a nearby store though, maybe now he thinks the job is so easy that he goes ahead and does it.
Handing criminals tools to make it seemingly easier to commit crimes seems like a dumb idea to me. But at least this one wasn't anywhere near as dumb as "Operation Fast and Furious [libertarianinstitute.org]".
Re: "entrapment" (Score:4, Informative)
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Note: it's also entrapment if the police coerce a person into committing crime. Which they also didn't do here.
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Even that depends. The BC legislature bombers got off due to being entrapped on appeal due to being a couple of junkies who weren't capable of getting the bus across town and the amount of work and encouragement the RCMP put into getting them to attempt to blow up the legislature.
Hmm, not appeal, but between conviction and sentencing the Judge found they were entrapped and quashed the conviction. From http://www.thealfalfafield.com... [thealfalfafield.com]
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Interesting, since the distance from Vancouver to Seattle is only 192 kilometers. I guess it would depend on where they thought the submarine would be located when they fired their homemade missile.
--
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Handing criminals tools
Did they give these phones away for free? I doubt it. Even if they did, I don't see anything about possessing an inexpensive phone that could be considered an inducement to commit crimes. Or I'd be on all the most wanted posters at the Post Office.
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Did they give these phones away for free?
It's in the summary. The phones were expensive.
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But, this phone WASN'T inexpensive. It was VERY expensive explicitly for these "special" capabilities.
Re: "entrapment" (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s not entrapment if they want to do it, but just so far didnâ(TM)t because it was hard. Itâ(TM)s only entrapment when the person would never think of doing it, and the police convinced it coerced him to do it.
Re: "entrapment" (Score:2)
For the phone as it was, no, it doesn't. And the write-up I submitted said as much.
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Entrapment proper requires overcoming resistance.
"I'll pay you to transport drugs for me" is not entrapment. You need to first say no, and then the undercover cop needs to overcome your resistance in some way. If the cop keeps on telling you a sob story about how their whole family will die or starve if they don't find a mule, or they follow you around incessantly, or they keep promising more and more money to a ridiculous amount, or they hint harm might come to you if you don't do this one thing, or they l
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"Here they sold phones to individuals who were criminals to begin with."
Here is how a thinking person can ignore what you have to say. If they were "criminals to begin with", "they" wouldn't need to sell them phones at all.
"The secure phone didn't turn them into criminals..."
No, it turned law enforcement into criminals. When that happens, criminals who have their rights violated will often escape justice.
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No, it turned law enforcement into criminals. When that happens, criminals who have their rights violated will often escape justice.
Remember that "criminal" is a designation based on a definition... a definition that is entirely under the control of the government.
In the western world, we play the ace as the high card by claiming that some things are "Natural Rights" and are therefore bestowed by "God" or "The Universe" or "Nature", and are or should be out of the reach of the government, which does help curtail some of the worst excesses. But it's not a panacea.
So in some ways, as in this instance, law enforcement cannot be criminals,
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Remember that "criminal" is a designation based on a definition... a definition that is entirely under the control of the government.
The government publishes one definition of criminality, the one it enforces with its own courts and police. It does not have a monopoly on defining criminality, however. Other parties will have their own standards by which the actions of law enforcement can rightly be judged as criminal—or as the Legal Services Commission of South Australia aptly puts it, "an offence that merits community condemnation and punishment". (See also: common law offence [wikipedia.org]; malum in se [wikipedia.org].)
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Nobody was suggesting maybe we should have stayed in the trees. The question is what should we do to avoid tyrants? It would seem to me we should (a) avoid walled gardens like Apple, who can't be trusted to not work with the government (b) use open source, end to end encryption apps which are... (c) either compiled by yourself, or a community you trust.
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apple and microsoft are MUCH better options the tech companies that monetize your data.
You had me right up to the last moment there when you - for no reason I can discern - roped M$ into your conclusion.
If you don't think Microsoft collects and monetises your data, you've not been paying attention. Microsoft bought SwiftKey. Why, because they couldn't code their own virtual keyboard? Of course not. They were buying SwiftKey's user base.
Why? What makes a virtual keyboard worth two hundred and fifty MILLION dollars?
It's so Microsoft can know what you type, including things that are private.
Appl
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Hey! Aren't the trees where the Apples are?
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Did this catch any but the unintelligent? (Score:2)
Assuming signal is not a honeypot with extraordinary pr, itâ(TM)s fairly straightforward research to determine who is and is not a worthy platform and was even a few years ago.
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Signal has some people that will be very hard to corrupt. That makes Signal pretty secure. They also have complied with court orders. Deception on this level is beyond the usual authoritarians.
That said, most criminals _are_ stupid and have about the same understanding of IT and IT Security of an average person, i.e. next to none. Many stupid people go for conspiracy theories and an "Underground Secure Phone!" may have fit right into their fantasy of how the world works.
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Many stupid people go for conspiracy theories and an "Underground Secure Phone!" may have fit right into their fantasy of how the world works.
To be fair, this was indeed very truthfully an "Underground Secure Phone" in every way... except the one way that mattered to the people who wanted it for the purposes for which they wanted it.
I would have loved to get my hands on a few of these for entirely non-criminal purposes.
The Guradian? (Score:4, Funny)
I think it's spelled The Grauniad.
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The summary doesn't explain this very well, but - The Guradian is an upcoming new Disney+ series set in the Star Wars Universe. Look for it this December!
Re:The Guradian? (Score:4, Informative)
That's actually reasonably obscure - might as well link to https://www.urbandictionary.co... [urbandictionary.com]
Irrelevant question. (Score:4, Insightful)
The Guradian's story was shared by jd (Slashdot user #1,658), who sees an ethical question. "As the article notes, what's to stop a tyrant doing the same against rivals or innocent protestors?"
Lets say the law enforcement did not do this. Would that stop the tyrant?
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Right, the "masses" don't benefit from enforced "property rights" at all.
It's amazing the stupid shit people will post on /.
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The question is posed to draw your attention to the idea that you may support the effort because the victims are "already criminals", as has been expressed here already by usual dimwits. If you can violate constitutional rights and ignore requirements for court orders for one group, you can also do it to protestors and political enemies. See, it's not really hard to understand.
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If you can violate constitutional rights and ignore requirements for court orders for one group, you can also do it to protestors and political enemies.
That wasn't the argument brought up in the summary or this thread.
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In reality, the warehouse contained a series of phones that the US would be particularly easy to track and intercept, because
Speaking of Sucker Baits (Score:2)
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Shias to the East, Sunnis to the West, fertile Mesopotamian valley in the middle ... they have been fighting since the days of Prophet Mohammad. The schism, called Fitna in Islam, happened just one generation after Mohammad. His wife Aisha fought in it leading a camel borne infantry against Ali, a son-in-law of Mohammad to avenge the assassination of the third Caliph, Uthman who was another son-in-law of Mohammad. https://en.wikipedia. [wikipedia.org]
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If you wind the clock back far enough - for example to the time of the Shah of Iran, before the Iranian Revolution in 1979 - you would see that the US was friendly towards Iran and indifferent towards Iraq. Then the Iranian Revolution overthrew the Shah, the US military went and crashed a few helicopters in the desert, trying to rescue hostages from the American Embassy in Tehran, and Iraq was viewed favourably.
Bu
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I've a horrible feeling that you're absolutely right about the causes of the Gulf War.
There was so much FUD about Iraq and the reasons for war. I don't think we can ever be sure what the motivations really were but I'm pretty sure they weren't honourable.
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Probably analog 1G phones, as the new digital 2G phones only debuted that year in Finland.
Because by and large law enforcement (Score:2)
We have a huge number of institutions explicitly designed to prevent our military from overthrowing our g
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Indeed. The problem is that the Police does tend to attract small-time authoritarians. Hence these people are generally more than willing to enforce any and all laws, the more restrictive the better and many have absolutely no restraint doing that. These are exactly the wrong people doing the job if you want any protection of freedoms.
Now, doing away with the police is not a good idea. But it needs to be carefully monitored and illegal behavior bu the police must have serious consequences for those that do
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Tyrants don't need to use a fake security app - they have complete control of the networks and can see who it contacting who, and use the age old method of a hammer and pliers to extract any necessary information from suspects.
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Law enforcement has, does and will server tyrants. There is nothing inherently ethical about laws or the people that enforce them and they are in no way required to protect freedoms. That is just the pretext used to sell laws.
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The answer, at least in the US, is judicial oversight. The judicial branch is tasked with preventing this, both against suspected criminals and "rivals or innocent protestors".
So, did a judge authorize this blanket wiretapping of unidentified people?
Interesting ethical question, huh? (Score:1)
what's to stop a tyrant doing the same against rivals or innocent protestors?
Wow, that's a really, interesting ethical question.
Oh wait, it's not, at all. Who cares.
1. Governments are already doing this.
2. However, if this really, really, really worries you, instead of buying your phone from your friend who "knows a guy" buy it from Apple.
Problem solved.
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Even if Apple really wanted to be ethical, which they don't, they wouldn't have any choice but to comply with a NSL requiring them to hoover up user data, and they wouldn't be allowed to tell us they had done it either. Using closed-source software when you expect security is a spectacular idiot move.
Ethical Answer (Score:3)
The Guradian's (sic) story was shared by jd (Slashdot user #1,658), who sees an ethical question. "As the article notes, what's to stop a tyrant doing the same against rivals or innocent protestors?"
And the ethical answer is that this operation makes that less likely to work. The An0m phone scam is now well known, and a tyrant seeking to get rivals or protestors to use their own "secure" device or app will have a harder time tricking them. People will say: "Remember the AnOm phone? Maybe I should just use PGP encryption, or other stealth measures, that I control.
Re: Ethical Answer (Score:2)
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As though "rivals" and "innocent protestors" are the only concerns.
We have literally been witnessing efforts for "right wing" social media alternatives; fundamentally the exact same things that are talked about here. You think it's somehow different that a "tyrant" monitor his own rather than monitor the "opposition"? A tyrant views everyone as potential opposition.
What's to stop? (Score:2)
Embracing transparency. Which means being true to a set of ethical standards in all of life's actions.
You can call me Buddha all you like, but when you can see the possibility of calling yourself Buddha, then you know you're getting somewhere!
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I don't call you Buddha.
"a tyrant" (Score:5, Insightful)
"What if a tyrant did it" is a kinda dumb, slippery-slope type argument.
The first question should be: Is this an ethical thing to do in a presumably free and democratic society? Whichever answer you give, then the same rules apply to tyrants.
If it is an ethical thing to do, then "but wait, you're a tyrant" just sounds like the usual name-calling that governments do to each other.
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I do no know whether what they did is an ethical thing. It looks at the very least highly fishy. Like selling fully functional weapons to criminals, but with a tracking beacon. Or like selling drugs to criminals to they can re-sell them.
But the way to limit this is pretty clear and works in other areas: Have an ethics oversight committee that has no stake in the outcome (hence absolutely no judges, politicians, lawmakers or police-persons on it) and is very hard to influence. What for for medical experiment
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How is a phone like weapons or drugs? It isn't, not at all.
It's like if the police opened a restaurant that serves the favorite dish of the local mob boss, so that he'd hold his meetings over dinner there while the cop waiters listen in. Which is absolutely fine.
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Read a bit up on war and organized crime: Communications is _more_ important than weapons. So you are right, it is not the same. It is _worse_.
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The first question should be: Is this an ethical thing to do in a presumably free and democratic society? Whichever answer you give, then the same rules apply to tyrants.
Only if you assume the tyrant is willing to hold himself to the rules, since no one is in a position to hold him to them.
What makes intrusive government action ethical in a free and democratic society isn't the details of the action, it's the details of the due process surrounding the authorization and response to the action. It's the impartiality of the judges and the evenhanded application of the rule of law. But when a tyrant does the same thing, they don't have to follow due process and the rule of la
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"What if a tyrant did it" is a kinda dumb, slippery-slope type argument.
The first question should be: Is this an ethical thing to do in a presumably free and democratic society? Whichever answer you give, then the same rules apply to tyrants.
If it is an ethical thing to do, then "but wait, you're a tyrant" just sounds like the usual name-calling that governments do to each other.
My first thought on that would be... Why would a tyrant go to such lengths when all a tyrant needs to do is manufacture enough evidence to convict them? If even bothering with that at all... The hallmark of a tyrant adhering to a fair and just legal system, they usually just arrest and execute their opponents sans trial.
Open source (Score:3)
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A strong argument for open source software.
More like a strong argument for _popular_ FOSS. Niche FOSS often sucks and does not get much review.
There's no "ethical" question (Score:1)
The moral of the story is to verify your shit before buying into it. Tyrants are everywhere, and they're extremely popular these days
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Indeed. These defectives have been a blight on the human race forever and will continue to be until we find a way to identify them early in ans securely contain their evil before they get power of any kind.
The other moral is to not trust anything you do not understand. Can be done with one indirection, but at two, it already gets dicey. Trust is not transitive.
lol (Score:2)
As the article notes, what's to stop a tyrant doing the same against rivals or innocent protestors?
Freedom Phone in a nutshell.
Stale dupe as usual (Score:2)
https://mobile.slashdot.org/st... [slashdot.org]
Dicedot needs new editors as the current batch display obvious contempt for the site and their audience. I'm not sure who owns Slashdot but they would be wise to direct the current staff to do a better job (their slackness is clearly deliberate so they know exactly what they are doing therefore can easily choose to correct it) or replace them with humans who support what made the old Slashdot great.
False advertisement (Score:3)
Could the customers that were not arrested launch a class action lawsuit? This seems to me to be an obvious case of false advertisement.
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Who would they file it against?
Sometimes it is good to be a programmer (Score:1)
Back in college I wrote my own encryption/decryption program. I knew it was secure up to a point. But I do wonder what the criminal underworld's tech people were thinking trusting some software that they didn't write in-house.
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Simple: This is merely natural selection. They only caught the stupid ones.
The average IQ in the set of criminals just went up.
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As if you know this.
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The problem is if you want to talk to other criminals they all have to use the same security protocol - it doesn't work if each criminal or each individual organization writes it's own secured app, each unable to communicate with others. This app naturally seemed like it was one that had been written by a criminal organisation and the additional genius of making it expensive and hard to get and only available via criminal associates made it that much more believable that it was what it claimed to be.
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I do wonder what the criminal underworld's tech people were thinking trusting some software that they didn't write in-house.
You cannot trust any encryption software which is not reasonably provable or which is not at least peer reviewed. They don't have the people to do it in the first place, and even if they did, it would be a bad idea.
You're much better off using something open source and popular than trying to write your own solution.
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Showing the value of open source. (Score:1)
And having somebody *YOU* personally trust audit the damn thing too!
Claims by third parties that you don't know are useless.
Example: The CAs behind your browser's built-in TLS certificates.
Other example: Auditing companies that you don't know auditing WhatsApp or Telegram or Treema.
Security (Score:2)
As an IT guy, I know without a doubt that:
- The only secure device is one you make yourself.
and that
- Rolling your own encryption/security is a recipe for disaster.
So... good luck with that. You need to be a genius who is able to secure their device against the most determined and well-funded of state-level attackers.
But most people aren't - so they have to rely on someone else being one of those kinds of guys. And they have no idea whatsoever if those guys are actually on their side or not, like this.
If
Good stuff (Score:2)
This communication app is just an extension of that. They must have seeded the app aro
Tyrants vs Common Criminals (Score:1)
The quantity of harm by Tyrants using this technique is nothing compared to the harm organized and common crime does to everyone in every country. This is not a good reason to say privacy matters above all else. Most people need privacy from criminals finding out where we live and what our money numbers are, and we don't need An0n's super privacy, and mainly, if our shit is recorded and scanned by the police, will be boring and unactionable. I say, good for the US and Australia law enforcement for this
Anom (Score:2)
The phone that gets a pillow case put over your head, a punch to your stomach, and your body thrown into the back of a windowless van driven by guys who work for scary 3 letter agencies.
Re: Yes we know, Guardian (Score:2)
Re: Yes we know, Guardian (Score:4, Insightful)
No, definitely not in the US and maybe not in Australia. An "expectation of privacy" does not mean communications are somehow immune from use as evidence. Why would they? Criminals could just say that they had an expectation of privacy in all of their communications and get off scot-free.
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Re: Yes we know, Guardian (Score:4, Funny)
Nah, it was probably just buried in the 1000 page EULA somewhere!
Not entrapment, just the cachet (Score:2)
Whatever AC might know, I don't care. I don't know or need no stinkin' AC. But...
I bet Apple is interested in the viral marketing aspects.
As a whole, I find the story hilarious.
However, if I was anywhere in the distribution chain, I would not be laughing. These are the worst kind of customers to leave dissatisfied or even feeling disrespected. The guys who knew someone are liable to get asked about exactly who they knew farther up the chain. And not asked so politely, either.
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The problem here isn't "expectation of privacy", it is wiretapping without court order. Law enforcement perpetrated a fraud on citizens in order to obtain wiretapping ability against them without judicial oversight.
It's not an expectation of privacy, it's an expectation of not having one's inherent rights violated through criminal conduct. It's an expectation of not being made of victim of law enforcement prior to any potential criminal act of your own.
"Criminals could just say that they had an expectatio
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Where does it say it was done with no judicial oversight? In fact, TFA says that they made the arrests when they did 'because the FBIs wiretap authorizations were about to expire'.
Re: Yes we know, Guardian (Score:5, Insightful)
Barring evidence due to unconstitutional violation of privacy is possible only if the existence, and source, of the evidence is ever revealed to the court. Evidence used to blackmail a criminal into an informant doesn't normally suffer from such limitations. Investigations based on such illicitly gathered evidence can also be laundered to conceal its illicit origin, or merely used to indicate to officers where to look. The FBI in the USA has a very poor reputation for collecting informants who remain criminals while working for the police, including infamous mobsters who used the FBI to eliminate competition.
Relying on such an agency to keep its data scrupulously legally obtained does not seem wise. It's why people were so concerned about PRISM, the NSA program for monitoring Internet communications in bulk, and the FBI's "Carnivore" program for monitoring email.
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Pretty sure that Australia doesn't have fruit of the poisonous tree in law and the worst would be a finger wag at the cops from the court during sentencing. The Americans likely would say it was the Australians fault and that the 4th doesn't apply. It's why there is the 5 eyes, so they can spy on each others citizens and share.
Not a lawyer or expert so could be wrong.
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The loop hole is by passing it via a third country.
The only thing that has to be proven in court is that the person who used the phone is the person they dragged into court. Everything sent by the device is provable if something actually happens (such as drug smuggling.)
Here's the problem, this is literately the reason for five-eyes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Domestic_espionage_sharing_controversy
"In late 2013, Canadian federal judge Richard Mosley strongly rebuked the CSIS for outsourcing its
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I can't speak for Australia, but in the US: If Bob uses ServiceX to communicate with Joe, then 3 people have the data: Bob, ServiceX, and Joe. Each one owns their copy of the data and can choose to release it without a warrant. So the only way a warrant is required is if all 3 choose not to give up the data. In general, services *do* give up the data without warrants so the US 4th amendment is mostly moot. And in this case, the service *was* the government.
I suppose the criminals could sue for false adv
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"Is there anything new about it?"
Yes, it works only twice, the first time is also the last time.
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Yes, it works only twice, the first time is also the last time.
In the criminal world it works repeatedly because everything has to be done in secret. It's not like Consumer Reports or Wirecutter are going to publish a list of the best law-enforcement-proof phones for drug dealers to use, so they have to get their advice from some guy who knows a guy who knows a guy, who may or may not work for the FBI.