FBI/AFP-Run Encrypted Phone
For three years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Australian Federal Police owned and operated a commercial encrypted phone app, called AN0M, that was used by organized crime around the world. Of course, the police were able to read everything—I don’t even know if this qualifies as a backdoor. This week, the world’s police organizations announced 800 arrests based on text messages sent over the app. We’ve seen law enforcement take over encrypted apps before: for example, EncroChat. This operation, code-named Trojan Shield, is the first time law enforcement managed an app from the beginning.
If there is any moral to this, it’s one that all of my blog readers should already know: trust is essential to security. And the number of people you need to trust is larger than you might originally think. For an app to be secure, you need to trust the hardware, the operating system, the software, the update mechanism, the login mechanism, and on and on and on. If one of those is untrustworthy, the whole system is insecure.
It’s the same reason blockchain-based currencies are so insecure, even if the cryptography is sound.
echo • June 11, 2021 8:24 AM
This kind of exercise is the natural end point of rote learned seat filler who have spent their entire lives working within a bureaucracy. It’s really neat way of turning public funds into a way to keep pen pushers occupied and operatives and managers and assorted hangers on. The fact it catches criminals is actually a good idea but incidental.
It’s probably something I would do if I were them but then I wouldn’t blab about it. I note these self-same law enforcement types go very tight lipped about operational methods when it suits them. I’m left trying to reconcile their sound touch “going dark” comments and their urge to parade their success to the point where they don’t just blow an operation or method but an entire strategy. Which one is it?
In the UK there has been police and government resistance to a more social policy led form of policing. There are many other faults including “no criming” which is both a way of fiddling police performance figures and getting out of doing work. The police themselves are alienating themselves from the very people and communities they are charged with protecting while losing out on a significant amount of high quality information which could put perpetrators of serious crime behind bars.
Right at the bottom of this are people who are impacted both by criminals and agents of the state making moral judgments. This is a hidden human rights crime.
All systems leak information. A testosterone fuelled system promoting emphatic square jawed duck and roll “Go! Go! Go!” attitudes and “going dark” woo woo is neglecting its biggest asset: ordinary decent people sometimes in situations they fell into perhaps because of state ignorance or community neglect. Put the same effort into egaging with them. Not corporate reputation washing or a made up on the hoof policy with nothing behind it. Something real. But that doesn’t fit with the fantasies of shouty thin skinned seat filler with a job title hating themselves for a stupifying job description and time served bung of a index linked pension for not rocking the boat.
I was actually in a situation once where I called the local UK police about an issue which had a cross-jurisdiction element. The dumb seat filler told me to contact the foreign police force. Pardon? I’m quite good on my law and knew it crossed the threshold but it never got a crime reference number. So how come this police officer wants me to do his job for him? Which one is it? Fast forward a few years and another cross-border issue pops up only this time it is both criminal with a potential terrorist element. So I call the FBI office at the US embassy in London. They cannot even be bothered to call me back to review the evidence and discuss the details. Well, they won’t. They are lazy seat filler who won’t lift a finger without the correct job title. I recall a third incident of this type but never made anything of it. Some years the very same types of people gained varying forms of power and took a match to the world and delighted in watching it burn.