5 ms·

This is a reminder why you should use E2EE messengers only.

upofadown 4mo ago
I guess there is an interesting possibility here. Perhaps the targets were encrypting end to end (that is more or less the default now with XMPP clients). With the TLS over top of everything the attackers would not know that. Perhaps they went to all this trouble for nothing.
matheusmoreira 4mo ago
One day that'll be illegal. End to end encryption? That obviously means you're a drug trafficking money laundering pedophile terrorist. Off to jail with you despite zero evidence. Maybe they'll declare your efforts to protect yourself as being in contempt of court and then jail you indefinitely until full decryption.
- perching_aix 4mo ago
  Sounds heartwrenching until you see a story like this: https://youtu.be/hKLIxxBrM-o https://youtu.be/hKLIxxBrM-o To absolutely no sane person's surprise, the main audience of e.g. anti-censorship platforms is exactly people who typically feel or find themselves censored, which in a harmonious or at least well-functioning society will not be a particularly cheritable set of individuals. In one where that's not the case, the audience would change alongside too, sure, but clearly these narratives mismatch reality, at least for now. Conversely, (actually) high privacy platforms will be primarily seeked out and leveraged by those who value precisely that. While the privacy scares have been pretty serious for a while, for now that is still both evidently, and indeed obviously, in good part criminals or other high risk individuals. It's like trying to pretend people are shopping for regular items on .onion webshops rather than for contraband. I'm sure that crowd exists, but like, who are we trying to fool here exactly? Performative victimhood only works so well, and until such blatantly deceptive narrative is being pushed, you may very well see your doomsday scenario realized. It's a trivially vulnerable position, so much so that it feels like a rhetorical trap almost. Like a poet self-sabotaging the monetization of their work, while waxing poetic about how they're (financially) un(der)appreciated. Although people have been getting into anti-government conspiracies pretty hard in the past few years, and governments have been working hard to demolish whatever good standing they have in parallel, so that does help your case I suppose. One may even recognize this miraculously well oiled process and nosedive in social trust as uncoincidental, in fact. But I digress. I wouldn't wanna spread conspiracy theories after all, would I?
  - jodrellblank 4mo ago
    I skim-watched your link and it doesn’t seem to support your thesis. First, the secure end-to-end encryption was broken by international police and messages were read without making it illegal. Second they suggest reading hundreds of thousands of people’s messages to catch a dozen or so gang members - not supporting your claim that only crooks use it. Third, the video ends by the gang leader saying he was working for the President; not supporting your implication that criticism of government is all baseless conspiracy theories.
    - perching_aix 4mo ago
      I have very serious concerns on the human vs LLM effort that went into this comment, but sure, let's go point by point then. The first counterpoint I can't even decipher, it makes no grammatical sense. Are you saying that law-enforcement-intercepted encrypted messages are not necessarily illegal? ...why would they be? Sounds like a strawman. The second is explicitly a strawman. I intentionally left space for legitimate use, because it's a trivial rhetorical target, so I just said that it primarily interests "illegitimate" use for now. While I do not have actually comprehensive data on the Sky userbase, the way these devices were distributed, the volume of criminal-use-connected messages uncovered, and the globally dispersed gang use presented in the video did suggest to me exactly what I said. I'm not sure why you think "just catching a dozen or so gang members" is a reasonable takeaway either, given that the video's focus was exactly just those people. We can take issue with this, and downgrade this to just being evidence of significant (in the statistical terminology sense of the word) criminal use rather than primary criminal use. I just both fail to find that particularly compelling, and don't really feel like arguing on your behalf. The third counterpoint I also struggle to decipher. It seems to also build on a strawman like the other two points. You accuse me of implying that "criticism of govt is all baseless conspiracy theories". I don't know how you managed to extract such a thing out of what I wrote, so I'm not sure how to respond. Governments around the world are routinely criticized, have plenty of perfectly valid things going against them, on which both the media and the general public report on plenty. It is - thankfully - only a select few places in the world where such speech is actually restricted. Now that was more a part of my point.

I guess there is an interesting possibility here. Perhaps the targets were encrypting end to end (that is more or less the default now with XMPP clients). With the TLS over top of everything the attackers would not know that. Perhaps they went to all this trouble for nothing.

matheusmoreira 4mo ago

One day that'll be illegal. End to end encryption? That obviously means you're a drug trafficking money laundering pedophile terrorist. Off to jail with you despite zero evidence. Maybe they'll declare your efforts to protect yourself as being in contempt of court and then jail you indefinitely until full decryption.

perching_aix 4mo ago
Sounds heartwrenching until you see a story like this: https://youtu.be/hKLIxxBrM-o https://youtu.be/hKLIxxBrM-o To absolutely no sane person's surprise, the main audience of e.g. anti-censorship platforms is exactly people who typically feel or find themselves censored, which in a harmonious or at least well-functioning society will not be a particularly cheritable set of individuals. In one where that's not the case, the audience would change alongside too, sure, but clearly these narratives mismatch reality, at least for now. Conversely, (actually) high privacy platforms will be primarily seeked out and leveraged by those who value precisely that. While the privacy scares have been pretty serious for a while, for now that is still both evidently, and indeed obviously, in good part criminals or other high risk individuals. It's like trying to pretend people are shopping for regular items on .onion webshops rather than for contraband. I'm sure that crowd exists, but like, who are we trying to fool here exactly? Performative victimhood only works so well, and until such blatantly deceptive narrative is being pushed, you may very well see your doomsday scenario realized. It's a trivially vulnerable position, so much so that it feels like a rhetorical trap almost. Like a poet self-sabotaging the monetization of their work, while waxing poetic about how they're (financially) un(der)appreciated. Although people have been getting into anti-government conspiracies pretty hard in the past few years, and governments have been working hard to demolish whatever good standing they have in parallel, so that does help your case I suppose. One may even recognize this miraculously well oiled process and nosedive in social trust as uncoincidental, in fact. But I digress. I wouldn't wanna spread conspiracy theories after all, would I?
- jodrellblank 4mo ago
  I skim-watched your link and it doesn’t seem to support your thesis. First, the secure end-to-end encryption was broken by international police and messages were read without making it illegal. Second they suggest reading hundreds of thousands of people’s messages to catch a dozen or so gang members - not supporting your claim that only crooks use it. Third, the video ends by the gang leader saying he was working for the President; not supporting your implication that criticism of government is all baseless conspiracy theories.
  - perching_aix 4mo ago
    I have very serious concerns on the human vs LLM effort that went into this comment, but sure, let's go point by point then. The first counterpoint I can't even decipher, it makes no grammatical sense. Are you saying that law-enforcement-intercepted encrypted messages are not necessarily illegal? ...why would they be? Sounds like a strawman. The second is explicitly a strawman. I intentionally left space for legitimate use, because it's a trivial rhetorical target, so I just said that it primarily interests "illegitimate" use for now. While I do not have actually comprehensive data on the Sky userbase, the way these devices were distributed, the volume of criminal-use-connected messages uncovered, and the globally dispersed gang use presented in the video did suggest to me exactly what I said. I'm not sure why you think "just catching a dozen or so gang members" is a reasonable takeaway either, given that the video's focus was exactly just those people. We can take issue with this, and downgrade this to just being evidence of significant (in the statistical terminology sense of the word) criminal use rather than primary criminal use. I just both fail to find that particularly compelling, and don't really feel like arguing on your behalf. The third counterpoint I also struggle to decipher. It seems to also build on a strawman like the other two points. You accuse me of implying that "criticism of govt is all baseless conspiracy theories". I don't know how you managed to extract such a thing out of what I wrote, so I'm not sure how to respond. Governments around the world are routinely criticized, have plenty of perfectly valid things going against them, on which both the media and the general public report on plenty. It is - thankfully - only a select few places in the world where such speech is actually restricted. Now that was more a part of my point.