>However, if you run a business that is making (according to the article) "hundreds of millions" selling handsets and subscriptions, why would you need to be in

>However, if you run a business that is making (according to the article) "hundreds of millions" selling handsets and subscriptions, why would you need to be involved in other very obviously illicit business? This wasn't always a huge business. I'm sure they became more careful after the incident with phantom secure. >I think it's more likely that this guy is really a "freedom and privacy at all costs" guy who probably knows what his product is being used for, and doesn't care because for him that comes with the territory, and also because he's raking in the money. Full disclosure: I work in this space, SkyECC was a competitor and I'm deeply familiar with their product. This guy is an opportunist and a liar promoting a very insecure product, constantly making false promises of security. He's made his money by exploiting the technical ineptitude of drug dealers. A "freedom and privacy at all costs" guy he is not. >If you're smart enough to able to set up a service like SkyECC in the first place, you're smart enough to know that one day the cops/feds/govt are going to take a shot at you, so you'd have some kind of plan in place for that I would think. You're clearly not very familiar with this space. It's rife with absolutely terrible products built by drug dealers who just hired a couple of developers from freelancer.com. SkyECCs sole focus was providing a polished user experience, not security. These clowns had their corporate active directory server (adsql.skyecc.com) exposed to the internet with RDP, SMB, LDAP all publicly accessible until it was seized a few days ago. They did nothing to harden their infrastructure after the Encrochat hack. I assure you they weren't prepared for the cops to come knocking.