Its not a defense against targeted attacks of individual devices.
Signal and E2EE stop dragnets, not targeted efforts. Which honestly is exactly what I want and seems like what we want in a free and open society. Monitoring shouldn't be the default but only happen when there is a warranted reason to monitor, preferable with a literal warrant. This embodies the idea of "innocent unless proven guilty" but balances the ability to move from suspicion to evidence gathering and minimizes the collection of data of innocent people. It's not "if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear" but "if you have nothing to suspect then you have no reason to search." I don't know how a dragnet doesn't violate the 4th amendment.
Back in the day people used to, hilariously, have MOTD notices on all of their illegal servers saying the internet equivalent of "You have to tell me if you're a cop".
I always found it humorous what laws they'd cite, when they bother to, to say basically "By clicking this button you assert you're not law enforcement officer".
Badger: "Prove you're not a cop."
...
Undercover cop: "If you ask a cop if he's a cop, he's like... obligated to tell you -- it's in the Constitution."
(Blah, I'm old)
A defense lawyer may give something like that a shot at least.
I have no idea if it would work in practice of course.
Perhaps it comes from some of the loose laws that require police to make some attempt to announce themselves and their purpose in specific situations (i.e. when executing a search warrant where they don't have reason to believe announcing themselves would pose a risk to their well being)
I hope SWIM is still in good health, despite everything they've been through.
Would be interesting to know if saying SWIM did, or didn't, save someone from unwanted legal attention at some point.
I’m fairly sure that the police can’t hack a random server then claim “I’m a cop so it’s okay” without a warrant. At the very least any evidence gathered may be deemed inadmissible. Accessing a system without permission may, I guess, fall in the same bucket.
In many cases, well-done E2EE like Signal stops dragnets and targeted efforts. Even with a literal warrant.
But my main point is that most people are afraid of large organizations of terrorists or bad actors will be able to discuss things without the ability for the FBI to surveil them. Well you can't have "large" and "vet everyone to an extremely high degree." Sure, this will make it more difficult to stop small groups, but those have been notoriously difficult to find and stop in the first place.
What I can do, however, is take measures to protect myself against less powerful or sophisticated attackers.
Where I come from, “communications metadata” is required to be kept by all telcos and isps. This metadata is them “available to law enforcement” - which is not just investigations into child abuse and drug running, as the proponents of the laws made out when advocating for them, but includes agencies such as the Taxi commission, various local councils, and state fisheries departments.
https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2018/11/14/comms_alliance_me...
Using (trusted) vpns and e2e encrypted messaging will reduce the chance of a local council or a fisheries inspector being able to get as much information from my metadata as they might from non VPN and secure messaging using people.
(Of course, it might backfire and just paint a big target on my back... One potential privacy advantage of COVID and widespread wfh is that many many more people are using VPN tunnels for ordinary and mundane purposes. Adding extra hay to the haystack my needle is trying to hide in is a good thing. So long as it’s not Mossad looking for my specific needle...)
At the same time, an unprecedented amount of private conversation happens using phones, raising the stakes and the default expectation of privacy.
The pendulum swung from insane dragnet surveillance to widespread availability of tech that is resistant to all but the most sophisticated surveillance efforts.
Interesting times!
It's only very recently that people have been communicating over the internet, allowing the mass surveillance. All encryption does is return us back to the pre 1990s in terms of surveillance capabilities.
On the flip side, even ordinary phone calls and messages are often encrypted by default now, which used to be much more readily available to law enforcement.
It's such an interesting situation, society-wise.
[citation needed]
Interestingly, there’s a sort of perverse incentive going on here. If cops and governments hadn’t historically abused phone taps and sms interception - then strongly encrypted e2e tech like Signal wouldn’t have become “necessary” in the minds of non criminal users concerned about privacy, and we probably wouldn’t have had well known and widely used services/platforms like Signal and Telegram already in place for people to flock to when WhatsApp made their privacy blunder.
I’m sure GreyKey and NSO are perfectly happy with a cyber arms race requiring cops to buy more and more expensive “fancy tech” every year...
Interesting times indeed.
Sadly, I think that’s considered a “feature” by modern law enforcement and judicial systems. Plea bargains and the sheer volume of laws that cannot possibly be understood by normal people make for a prosecutorial power balance that genuinely means everybody really is just “innocent until they decide to prove you guilty”.
The well known “Don’t talk to police” lecture is extremely on point here: https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE
Your _are_ guilty of something. If you come to the attention of the wrong LEO, they will find something to prosecute you for, and like Al Capone, they’ll perfectly happily send you to jail for tax evasion if they’ve decided but cannot prove you are guilty of something else.
That’s totally fucked up.
Its more than warrants, though. The evidence of the last few decades is that warrants aren't enough to block dragnets. Warrants can (and are) avoided through parallel construction. Unscrupulous agents will go off on "LoveInt" missions if it suits their ethics.
Universal encryption uses economic force to make dragnet surveillance infeasible where ethical force has failed.
Those folks walked over on public roads from a Trump rally down the street, live streaming on a hundred cameras as they did it. Of all the things that went wrong on the 6th, surveillance was clearly not one of them.
What I think you're remembering is more the point that Signal and Telegram provide harder-to-surveil forums for the people who got radicalized. That having all that chatter be private by default means that we won't see the next extremist faction before its born. And that's a fair enough point. Q communities on Facebook and Twitter made it easy to see where these people were coming from.
But even there, the nature of radicalization is that it happens in a big group. There may be surveillance-proof channels on Telegram where modern right wing extremists are assembling to find like minded souls, but finding them isn't a problem at all. The ones that are hard to find die out by definition.
Cynical view. Those made it easy to see what the manipulated fairly public mass of disenfranchised or disgruntled or actively evil Q/Trump supporters were discussing and planning. I’ll bet people like flexcuff guy and pipebomb guy weren’t discussing _their_ plans in such public forums. And I’ll bet there was a _lot_ of planning of the sort that used to take place in underground-public places like 4chan, which has now gone deeper underground and has much more stringent initiation rites for admitting new members. The sort of planning that involves manipulating and convincing “pawns” in their “it’s all about ethics in video game journalism” games to provide cover and take the fall for deeply serious shit...
I dunno, some of those folks were pretty brazen. Remember they thought all this was, if not "legal" exactly, "sanctioned" by their sitting president. They weren't trying to hide.
But even if we grant that the premise (which is clearly true) that serious criminals will always have the ability to hide from surveillance, the presence of an easily found public forum is still a prerequisite for real insurrection.
Flexcuff guy and pipebomb guy may have been hardened experts, but they couldn't have sacked the capitol with only their militias behind them. The preventable part of this is the mob violence. And mob violence requires a mob, which requires that the members of the mob (by definition amateurs) be able to find forums to radicalize them.
And this is exactly what I mean by
>>> As if you can create a secret communication channel that members of the public can join but the FBI is unable to infiltrate.
A mob needs to radicalize people and recruit. If you are recruiting and not on the FBI's watch-list I'm going to blame the FBI, especially since you are actively radicalizing people. Any insurrection or major plot will require recruitment of people which it is difficult to vet. This (should) makes for a trivial ability to infiltrate. If it doesn't I'm really disappointed in the Three Letter Agencies as they clearly make themselves out to be more than woefully incompetent. We're spending all that money and people can't click a link? I'm pretty confident they can accomplish this.
(https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/05/uk-police-have-a-new-tactic-f...)
I remember reading this a few years back. The title says it all. Why bother cracking codes etc when you can get a judge to sign THAT for you? :)
Going through the PDF of the legal document, on page 10, the screenshots have a description of the "Source extraction" (point): "....<some long zip filename-I assume the dump>/private/var/Containers/Shared/AppGroup/<long HEX number>/telegram-data/account<long number>/postbox/db/db_sqlite"
I got so many questions.. I believe Telegram does NOT encrypt group chats. And the default setting is that it does NOT encrypt 1-1 chats. You have to jump the extra hoop (a couple of taps) to start a new and encrypted chat (you cannot encrypt an existing chat).
So.. the chat was not encrypted? So they 'just' managed to bypass iPhone's lock, and dump all the storage, look for messaging SQLITE files, read them. Are we sure they didn't get that data from iCloud (and hiding it - with permission?). Page 11 writes: "Several videos from his iCloud depict him apparently showing off his cash." Could the authorities have gotten an automated backup from iCloud, the guy was using an unencrypted Telegram chat, so basically not much hacking took place?
Side note: big Supernatural fan here - page 10, the second 'blue' message writes "..Poughkeepsie". In the Supernatural universe "Poughkeepsie" is the Winchesters' secret distress signal to each other meaning that something is wrong and they are to drop everything and run.
The typical security model for iOS apps assumes that the local device is secure, as its storage is already encrypted by the system based on its passcode/biometrics (on initial power-up biometrics aren't available).
End-to-end encryption within chat apps typically refers to encryption over the network. It does not include encryption of messages once they reach their intended recipients.
This isn’t quite correct. iOS applications can exclude files from iCloud backups.
PSA: On an iphone if you hold down the power button and a volume button for a second, your phone will lock into the state its in just after you turned it on. From here it can only be unlocked with your passcode. You can perform this gesture without taking your phone out of your pocket.
(Edit: When the phone is unlocked, you need to use power + volume down. Power + volume up while the phone is unlocked takes a screenshot.)
On android phones, it takes a screenshot.
iOS also takes a screenshot when the phone is unlocked if you use power + volume up. Holding power + volume down hard locks the phone even when its unlocked
Of course, maybe bringing an unlocked laptop with details of your drug empire to a cafe wasn’t the best opsec out there.
Consistently running your drug empire from your home isn't good enough opsec either when you have a nation state targetting you.
THIS.
Thank you for your eloquence.
Courts can compel them to keep these records, and require them to not disclose to their customers that they are doing so.
There’s still some “trust” required in both Whispersystems to not backdoor updates, as well as Apple and Google to not backdoor the distributed apps after Whispersystems submit updates for publication.
There is though, some ability for skilled enough people to “trust but verify” by reversing the app bundles after publication. I believe (but not for any good evidence based reason) that there are “enough eyeballs” interested in Signal that _hopefully_ if a backdoored app update ever appears the white hats will raise the alarm quickly (I have no doubt the black hats will sell the details to NSO/GreyKey just as quickly...)
I’d be curious to see if WhisperSystems are prepared enough to lawyer up and fight like that. (I suspect they’d probably get NSLed like Lavabit did we won’t know about it until way later...)
Seems to me like the trial was a show for PR, and a win for the FBI because now a ton of people are under the impression that they can commit crimes without a trace if they have an iPhone.
Signal was subpoenaed in court, and told to give up information[0] on certain customers. They replied the only information they had was the time the account was created and the date of the last connection. Admittedly, this was over 5 years ago. They fought to get these court records released.
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/fbi-demands-sign...
The point is to make it impossible to compromise everyone all at once and stream that data into a system designed to automate the manufacturing of consent.
It has to cost something non negligible to violate someone's privacy, and that cost will demand evidence and accountability from those who are authorized to wield that power.
I guess our hope is that they won't care what we said after a decade or two.
Problem solved.
Thinking about upgrading to a small commercial grade shredder or microwave.
I consider myself “recreationally paranoid”. I like to consider possible avenues of attack on me, and work out mitigations where possible. I’ve always considered it a subset of some people’s “hacker mindset”. The question of “How would I break into my stuff if I were motivated to, and what can I do to prevent it or make it more difficult to break?” provides me with a lot of satisfying thinking, even though I’m not planning to overthrow a government or move shipping containers of narcotics across borders.
Do keep a fire extinguisher in the room below though, it's more effective than you think.
It’s happened only once to me in over 50 years, and that was because I foolishly assumed a 3rd story window was safe to leave open, when there was enough plumbing on the wall that a determined enough petty thief could climb through it. All I lost was a computer (a PowerMac 6100) but had recent-enough backups at work that it was only minority annoying to replace and deal with insurance. (There was personal email and the like on it, and stored passwords. I monitored the email server carefully for 6 or 12 months after that, and never saw a single login attempt. Whatever they did with it, they wiped it before they connected it to the internet and the email logged I automatically).
I’m also not so concerned about my government coming in for my computers. They’re too incompetent to do it well except for major targets. I do enjoy the thought experiments around “what would happen if the government ‘went bad’?”
(I’m also aware the I, like probably everybody, have data on my machines that if cherry picked by prosecutors would be awkward to have to defend myself against in court. I often rant about wanting to stab my idiot co workers in small group chats for example. If I were a prosecutor trying for force me into a plea bargain or an leo attempting to coerce me into doing something I’d prefer not to do, I have no doubt that a fairly damning looking case could be constructed by choosing only the parts of my data that when put together paint a bad but fictitious/out-of-context story...)
Similarly with a microwave. The reflections and sparks might kill the microwave before the hard drive in your device is actually damaged. Please correct me if im wrong, but the microwaves shouldn't actually be able to flip the bits, but just heat up the material.
A shredder strong enough to tear the metal/silicon/plastic apart in small enough pieces sounds reliable.
Now you have a new problem: Destruction of evidence.
Specifically, you need to knowingly be the subject of an investigation. I'd assume destroying the phone when you see the cops coming but before you've seen the warrant would be a grey area. Please, lawyers, clarify.
"I had no idea I would be under investigation when I saw the cops arriving at the door. I just decided it'd be fun to beat the shit out of my laptop with a hammer at that exact moment."