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Comment by hobbitstan | Hacker News Reader

Wickr is a notorious hideout for pedophiles sharing CSAM. I wonder if that had anything to do with this?

> the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had invested $1.6 million into Wickr via the CIA's shell company In-Q-Tel (…) Wickr markets itself to government agencies (…) On June 25, 2021, Wickr was acquired by Amazon (…) the founder of the controversial private security firm Blackwater, is one of the principal investors.

Checks out lol

Yeah if it wasn’t comped before, it sure was after that.

Well, maybe?

HUMINT types around the world rely on very pedestrian means to communicate with their assets, so one might imagine it's a not-quite-banal but legitimate(?) use rather than straight-up infiltration.

Haven't heard about that but I know people use it to buy drugs quite often, as in the dealer will message you through Wickr, then you transfer crypto payments and they either mail it or drop it off. A breeding ground for scams related to this as well.

This person is getting downvoted, but he's 1000% not wrong. It's bad.

This is reddit?! Almost!

Any private end-to-end encryption solution could be considered a hideout for pedophiles or drug trade.

Similar things have been said for people who pay with cash.

Used by "people with something to hide", and by people with dignity - people who deem it inappropriate to allow being tracked: "people with everything to hide".

Any hotel could be a haven for drug dealing and prostitution.

Wickr didn't require a phone number for account registration or identification so it attracted a higher proportion.

Wickr is hardly the only platform with end-to-end encryption not requiring phone numbers. The same applies to Matrix, for example. That's not a valid rationale or explanation for shutting down a platform.

So E2E chats in Telegram have the same problem.

Every good thing can be used by bad people.

Telegram needs to store your messages in an unencrypted manner on their own servers but hey, at least no one "else" can see any of your message over the network due to their awesome E2E support.

Telegram needs a phone number to sign up.

So just move to Matrix clients (Element, Fluffychat) or Wire, Session, Tox, etc.

I think Wire also moved to enterprise only, sadly. At least it appeared that way last time I visited.

TIL so replace in my list Wire with Briar

Oh wow, looks like Signal requiring a phone number strikes a good balance.

No it doesn’t.

Yea, it is.

As you can only pick two of three choices to protect:

- identity

- its message content

- resistance to forgery

unlike say, Walmart and Purdue.. very legal there

Yeah I only heard of it as a place to buy hard drugs.

Others as a user/pass - anonymous, as expected - communications system that was selected by the Air Force of the USA.

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