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Can someone tell me why a special custom phone would be necessary? What could it possibly give you that Signal and a fingerprint lock doesn’t? Is it just a ca
by JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
Can someone tell me why a special custom phone would be necessary? What could it possibly give you that Signal and a fingerprint lock doesn’t? Is it just a case of criminals not understanding the technology? I’d actually be more suspicious of a phone that has been hacked apart by a shady company.
- dmix 7y agoSpies would never use obviously custom phones for this reason. The goal is to blend in, not stand out. Especially when the adversary has total network access. As the CIA learned in Lebanon when their network got rolled because Hezbollah noticed certain phones left off most of the time except the occasional use before being turned off the network again - very unusual behaviour which exposed their trade raft. The majority of drug dealers don't face this level of threat, depending on the country, where any level of encryption and careful phone protocols would go a long way. But the very big ones will as the bigger agencies have much broader reach and the NSA shares with DEA all the time. WhatsApp was probably the best thing to happen to drug dealers in a long time. But most of them are too dumb to know that and people will always be the greatest weakness regardless of all the fancy tech.
- unionpivo 7y agoThe way I understand is they used existing phones like google pixel, and loaded them with custom android distribution, with their end to end encryption set as default.