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With a single wiretap, police collected 9.2M text messages
- xenospn 7y agoSo stop using Android or switch to WhatsApp. Simple.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoOr iMessages. Or Signal.
- lern_too_spel 7y agoiMessage has a backdoor for Apple in the keyserver that a government can compel Apple to use for a wiretap. https://www.lawfareblog.com/iphones-fbi-and-going-dark https://www.lawfareblog.com/iphones-fbi-and-going-dark The existence of this backdoor (in combination with the fact that iCloud and iMessage are operated by a PRC-controlled business in China) is likely the reason iMessage is not blocked in China.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoIt does not permit the same dragnet to occur as using bare SMS messages.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lern_too_spel 7y agoIt makes possible a dragnet of iMessage communications in China. In the US, the Fourth Amendment prevents a dragnet on SMS messages (and on iMessage).
- viraptor 7y agoWhat does Android have to do with wiretaps?
- solotronics 7y agothe default SMS message protocol is unencrypted
- viraptor 7y agoNo, SMS is unencrypted on all platforms. I think you meant that iOS may sometimes send encrypted messages to other numbers. But that's not a great solution for a common e2e.
- xenospn 7y agoAndroid phones send SMS messages.
- viraptor 7y agoSo does every mobile phone.
- blackoil 7y agoYou mean stop using SMS, switch to WhatsApp.
- SapporoChris 7y agoWhatsApp is now owned by Facebook. I still remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana... and consider Whatsapp to be now compromised. And don't forget that the app was hacked last May. I'm interested in learning why this is still a recommended application for secure messaging.
- lettergram 7y agoBuried in the article is that no arrests were made and that warrants for wiretapping requests were down 25% overall in 2018. However, warentless wiretapping was up 25%: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/30/nsa-surveillance-spike/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/30/nsa-surveillance-spike/
- lern_too_spel 7y agoThat article is confusing due to the author being confused himself. Warrantless wiretaps can only be ordered for non-US people living outside the United States believed to have national security relevant communications. These people do not have Fourth Amendment protection. The ODI's transparency report (the article's only citation, from which I have obtained every fact in this post) says that indeed went up from 129K targets in 2017 to 165k targets in 2018, but the article never mentions that. Instead, it talks about searching the recorded communications of those targets for communications related to US people who aren't being wiretapped themselves.
- sandworm101 7y ago>> Warrantless wiretaps can only be ordered for non-US people living outside the United States Except in the case of voluntary handovers, situations where the communication provider hands over data without the need of a warrant. A cop can purchase the same location or other data any advertiser can. https://www.wired.com/2017/02/police-get-location-data-without-warrant-end/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/police-get-location-data-witho...
- lern_too_spel 7y agoThat is not a wiretap. A wiretap obtains contents of communications. There is also no evidence that voluntary handovers are increasing.
- mehrdadn 7y agoConfused, can someone explain why this is downvoted?
- viraptor 7y ago> three-month wiretap that collected 9.1 million text message from 45 individuals ~2210 messages per person per day on average? (~138/day hour) That's either really impressive, or something doesn't add up...
- sandworm101 7y agoya ... I got the math wrong. It is 149 people, not 45.
- Thorrez 7y agoThe article mentions 2 different wiretaps. One is 9.2M with 149 people, the other is 9.1M with 45 people.
- paxys 7y agoShit like this is the reason everyone needs to use E2E encrypted messaging.
- A2017U1 7y agoDoesn't do a thing for metadata. Average Australian has 15,000 datapoints collected daily and stored for warrantless access by virtually any govt department, most of it cellphone location.
- sandworm101 7y ago9.2M? 145 people over 3 months? That's 9.2M / (145*90) = 700~ texts per PERSON per DAY. That's insane. Even if each text goes to ever other person and is double counted, that is still 17+ texts per day from each person. Are these teenagers? Do drug dealers really send texts to dozens of people at once? We have to be missing something.
- snikch 7y agoYea I came to ask that same question. All I can assume is that’s badly reported and in fact entire cell tower’s messages were being tapped. Which has huge repercussions for privacy. Another thought could be some sort of forwarding service. Regardless these numbers are massive.
- zaroth 7y agoA halfway determined teenager probably sends over 700 texts an hour. I wouldn’t be surprised to see rates upwards of 1,000 per hour for some users. Average character count per text is probably low. Median character count could be something like 3. That’s all rank speculation on my part. Would be interesting to see actual data on this though!
- dredmorbius 7y ago11 a minute? One every 5 seconds? Sustained? For 24 hours/day, 7 days/wk, 4 weeks/mo, 3 months straight? I somehow doubt that very much.
- r3bl 7y ago> For 24 hours/day, 7 days/wk, 4 weeks/mo, 3 months straight? The comment above reached a figure of 700 per day per person. For my teen self, that's about two or three hours of conversation per day. It's certainly sustainable for months. Hell, I was known as the outlier in my teen circles because I liked to send longer messages (actually combining full sentences into one message) from time to time.
- 7y ago
- p4bl0 7y agoI've already said it but once again: I can't access this website at all on mobile: I first land on an RGPD warning except that I can't refuse cookies and tracking directly from it so I need to follow a link, which doesn't have any settings either but un bunch of other links, and it continues. After the tenth link followed I just gave up. Fuck you Techcrunch, fuck you Oath, fuck you Verizon Media, fuck you Yahoo Consent.
- moreira 7y agoIf you’re in the EU, don’t forget to complain to your relevant data protection authority, and let them investigate the legality of it (GDPR requires that it be easy to say no as it is to say, which clearly isn’t the case here). If you’re outside the EU, you might want to consider getting involved in the political process of your country so that one day you too may have legal protections for your data.
- cameronbrown 7y agoTracking consent needs to be built in at the browser level.
- bandrami 7y ago9.1 million of them were "u up?"
- maxheadroom 7y agoWhat I take away from this is that the bar for warrants is either too low or there's something afoot in the law enforcement sector. 4 x 30 (just easy rounding) = 120 days against 149 individuals. This is not a small-scale surveillance operation and all of that time, money, and effort amounted to zero arrests? Then what was the justification for the warrant that was used to enact the wiretap, in the first place? "We kind of think that something maybe kind of sort is happening, potentially, with this possible group of possibly known individuals..."? This doesn't add-up. Aren't warrants supposed to be used to investigate for evidence of crimes where other evidence is presented with the warrant application that a crime has possibly been committed and, thus, such gathering is necessary to further collect information directly pertinent to the investigation? This just sounds like rubber-stamping surveillance to maybe catch individuals that may be involved in some possibly nefarious actions that some officers suspect is going on but don't really have anything else to go on... Otherwise, how can you go to a court and say, "Based on 'x', we think these 149 individuals are involved in 'y' crime and we need to gather evidence in support of that...", waste so much time, resources, man-hours, etc. and still come up empty-handed; especially, when you were supposed to have sufficient enough evidence against at least one individual to have the warrant granted in the first place? The way this unfolded, it seems like it was more of a fishing expedition than anything worth-while and that is the most disconcerting part.