British man acquitted over Snapchat bomb hoax | Hacker News Reader

British man acquitted over Snapchat bomb hoax

bbc.co.uk

21 pointsbloqs8 comments

Snapchat: "We also work to proactively escalate to law enforcement any content appearing to involve imminent threats to life, such as...bomb threats..."

So looks like Snapchat leaked it to the Brits who passed it to the Spanish.

So, if Snapchat is doing surveillance on private conversations, is it reasonable to assume almost all “private” conversations on all platforms are subjected to bulk surveillance?

Any data that exists on servers that are not owned directly by you are subject to warrantless surveillance by way of the Third Party Doctrine in the United States.

It's not only reasonable to assume it, but to assume otherwise would be negligent.

Of course.

The fact the government got their hands on the message implies that Snapchat has WeChat-levels of monitoring and keyword detection/censorship. I wouldn’t be surprised if most social media companies have similar cooperation with governments. Not much difference to living in China (in this specific scenario. Of course China is much worse in other areas)

If you search the web for 'is Snapchat e2e encrypted', you'll find a bunch of unofficial resources saying yes, but no official page saying so.

I think the actual answer is no. Snapchat uses Https only, so the server can still read/scan all messages.

does this imply an image-to-text keyword and automatic escalation system from Snapchat? or perhaps someone just reported it...

My understanding is that British intelligence intercepted the private chat:

> "The message he sent to friends, before boarding the plane, went on to be picked up by UK security services."

> In the judge's resolution, cited by the Europa Press news agency, it was said that the message, "for unknown reasons, was captured by the security mechanisms of England when the plane was flying over French airspace".

> A spokesperson for Snapchat said the social media platform would not "comment on what's happened in this individual case".

This is similar to what I've read in other media.

If anything, by bringing this to trial they advertised to the world that this has been happening. Can't eat your cake and have it, too.

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