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Comment by rbobby | Hacker News Reader

I find this a bit concerning. Catching bad guys is all well and good but I wonder whether the various governments are overreaching.

Selling a bugged phone to a known criminal is likely fine (cite: The Wire).

But is it acceptable to sell a bugged phone to unknown/unidentified/random people and then use the phone's communications to determine if the owner is a crook and the owner's identity? The sole basis of suspicions seems to be "bought phone", or maybe "bought phone using bitcoin", or even "bought phone on TOR using bitcoin".

It will be interesting to see how many of these cases hold up in court.

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I suspect it was likely a multi-step process to actually get authorization to track a new phone and decrypt messages. For example:

>Step 1: Confirm known bad guy has phone through some other means.

>Step 2: Decrypt phone messages of known bad guy. Confirm they are criminal activities.

>Step 3: Note all previously unknown phones that exchanged criminal messages with known criminal.

>Step 4: Those phones are now considered belonging to known criminals. Return to Step 2.

Now, its totally possible they were just saying “someone bought a phone through TOR, they are probably bad so we can decrypt their messages” but that doesn’t have to be true for them to have worked their way through this criminal network.

Yes, and the court documents released include FBI reasoning based on previous sampling of users showing that the people who bought these phones were criminals. They're not ordinary phones, and distribution is intentionally limited. Drug smugglers don't want to let just anybody buy a phone for their encrypted network, you know

> Drug smugglers don't want to let just anybody buy a phone for their encrypted network, you know

I mean, if it’s well encrypted, it should be strong enough to not worry about any random being on the network too, no?

I guess that’s too counterintuitive for those sweating right now.

I haven't read the court documents, but this seems theoretically solvable by just only accessing the backdoor on any particular phone once you've seen it send an incriminating message to a phone you are already accessing (and getting judges to sign off on warrants for it, paperwork is probably a nightmare).

You start with the head honchos phone, someone texts him about a drug shipment, so you get a warrant to access the backdoor on that phone as well, and so on.

As long as there aren't isolated cells, you get every cell phone. Since you're relying on the head honcho to push the phones, there probably aren't isolated cells.

These phones weren't "normal" in a way that non-criminal would just happen to buy/use - all of their functionality was stripped out except the ANOM app which was disguised as a calculator app and you needed to input a code to access it.

I'd also assume they don't just take orders from anyone, I'd imagine you'd need a referral.

Log it all, and use network discovery and the legal process to access each new device? The main problem for the feds is that the data will be gone. Since it's not gone, they can use the legal process at their leisure.

From what I read you could only buy/activate this phone(or app?) if you knew someone using one and they were only sold on the black market by people who knew the criminal organisations

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