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I never understood the purpose of those phones. They aren’t using their own secret crypto (which would be a bad idea) like the military does, so why not just us
by morpheuskafka 4y ago
I never understood the purpose of those phones. They aren’t using their own secret crypto (which would be a bad idea) like the military does, so why not just use something like Signal?
If I were in this market, I’d be more suspicious of some modified device sold specifically to unsavory characters. It would be a great target for the government to compromise.
- from 4y agoThe phones "just work" and are a kind of status symbol. It's not like selling drugs even at a high level requires a lot of brainpower. Buy from Colombians, put in shipping container disguised as something else, wait, ???, profit. You just have to have a large risk appetite.
- roxgib 4y agoI suppose if you're someone selling privacy to criminals, it's a lot easier to preconfigure mid-range Android phones to sell than to configure each individual customer phone for maximum privacy. Also, it's not just about keeping your own data private, but about the other person you're communicating with. If you know the other person is using the same phone you can feel safer that it's secure, as opposed to trusting that the other person is taking things seriously and knows what they're doing when configuring their own phone. Plus it makes it easier to enforce things like messages being deleted after a period of time. The extra cost is easy to justify when you're trying to avoid jail time.
- fragmede 4y agoWhich, they have, eg https://www.engadget.com/fbi-encrypted-chat-app-anom-criminals-102001487.html https://www.engadget.com/fbi-encrypted-chat-app-anom-crimina... But imagine you're the tech-smart mobster trusting your freedom to the rest of the mobsters. You really want to play text support, or you just gonna properly setup Signal to auto-destruct and pre-verify safety number and give those devices out?