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Comment by sbierwagen | Hacker News Reader

It does.

The standard playbook for rolling up criminal conspiracies is to arrest a low level member, offer him a reduced sentence in return for testimony, arrest the next guy higher up based on that testimony, etc. (The only way to prevent that would be a fully trustless "cell" structure where none of conspirators know each other, which has never been done in real life.)

You will notice none of this requires communications intercepts. This is because the feds are simply lying when they say encryption prevents law enforcement operations.

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> The only way to prevent that would be a fully trustless "cell" structure where none of conspirators know each other, which has never been done in real life.

When properly done, such organization is almost impossible to find. I'd not be too sure about them not existing. The idea is well known, so someone must have tried it at least.

How would they recruit?

PGP recruitment drives

Refer a friend -> referral goes up the chain and back down to a different group?

Ah the infamous crossover: Cartel x MLM.

Now the friend knows two groups.

Only leaf groups, with very tenuous connections.

There was a Chinese drug lord operating out of Canada who did successfully pull off the cell structure. Amazon of Drugs or something.

Somehow they managed perfect forward secrecy.

For a while.

Here he is.

https://torontolife.com/city/this-man-is-the-jeff-bezos-of-t...

Not sure about never been done in real life - some of the Provos and Unionists in Northern Ireland pivoted their cell structures from terrorism to profitable crime when peace broke out.

Peace broke out?

It's a reasonable common idiom with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

(Btw, you've been shadowbanned a while ago. I'm only mentioning this, because your recent comments seem sane as far as I can tell.)

TIL.

I've only ever heard it on an episode of Monty Python. Wonder if it's just a UK thing.

I've heard it in other context, but those people might have picked it up (indirectly) from Monty Python.

Thank you. I know my comments are usually short, but I like to ask questions to learn new things. Appreciate you letting me know. I guess I need to try a new account.

You should email dang. I didn't bother to review your comment history, but if your new comments are avoiding whatever got you shadow banned, he'll probably give you another chance. Skipping that step, there's a very good chance your new account would get auto-shadowbanned as well.

Thank you again. I will give that a try!

It has never been discovered to exist. If it’s actually good it’ll defeat attempts to uncover it. An even better cell structure would be one where the cells don’t even know that other cells exist.

> An even better cell structure would be one where the cells don’t even know that other cells exist.

You can’t have a network with more than one cell where no one outside of the cell knows that it exists, and without those people using a communication method to people in the cell that at least one person in the cell knows exists. And when you minimize down to the minimum contact, the network is very much non-resilient: its hard to discover and roll-up, but (especially if the cells are doing high-risk functions, which is probably why you want to do it) its also easy to disintegrate accidentally, even without being discovered and rolled-up.

I think you -could- generate a network of cells where cells are independent and the communicator doesn't know the cells - broadcast your radicalisation on radio and let the cells organise themselves. At least one cell member knows about the communication method but since it's broadcast, I think that's safe (in this context.)

But practically there's a whole bunch of problems as you say - you've no idea how many - if any - cells exist, they can't coordinate on which one picks up a particular target, the communicator is obviously at risk from being tracked down, how do you tell people where the radio broadcast is, authorities can obviously listen in once they've found the broadcast, etc.

> "and the communicator doesn't know the cells - broadcast your radicalisation on radio and let the cells organise themselves. At least one cell member knows about the communication method"

Couldn't be done by sending messages encrypted with private key and the cells decode it with public key?

Then the problem is: How to trust public keys to have been provided by the "right" correspondent, and not someone from another gang or law enforcement?

Not trying to start an argument because I think your statements are mostly correct. I do think you can have autonomous actors inside of cell systems that can compose an entire cell. Especially at the lowest levels.

Cell systems have order, but only where the most risk is imposed. Lesser risk, less order. Infact, too much order imposes far more risk.

Well it's never been done in real life that we're aware of. Mostly because if it has been done, they almost certainly were not caught by traditional policing techniques.

Why would you even want to be in a conspiracy if you don't know anyone? You couldn't trust that it would work or you wouldn't be manipulated.

The Crips and the Bloods are kind of like that cell structure, but cells have internal beef all the time. If you had different cells have no communication, that would happen way more as they try to expand

That's not how cells work though. Cells don't know people in other cells. Well maybe one or two people do. Sure an internal beef can happen but the people in the cell are mostly still responsible for themselves not the others in the cell.

Think of a cell like a class in programming. If a class has a bug you can fix the bug, or make a new class with the same ins and outs. Never have to restructure the entire code base. Properly made classes don't leak to other ones. Worst case internal beefs take down prod for a bit but they don't take down the entire program

> Why would you even want to be in a conspiracy if you don't know anyone?

Perhaps you are in it for the ideology? Or perhaps they pay you?

> none of conspirators know each other,

"Why am I Mr. Pink?"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105236/characters/nm0000114

Apple does this kind of secrecy well.

I suppose you're talking about development teams that have no knowledge about what other development teams are working on.

My sense is that it has become a bit more lax since Apple has grown and, well, let's face it, Steve is no longer with the company.

>The only way to prevent that would be a fully trustless "cell" structure where none of conspirators know each other, which has never been done in real life.

Or you just have your buddies enact violence on the friends/relatives of anyone caught squealing.

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