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Corrupt UK police analyst gets prison time for tipping off a friend that encrypted messaging app had been compromised (1ft.io)

submitted 10 months ago by DougHolland@lemmy.world to c/thepoliceproblem@lemmy.world

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[-] youngGoku@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

How can end-to-end encryption be compromised though?

[-] 000999@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 10 months ago

The investigation accelerated in early 2019 after receiving EU funding.[2] At the end of January 2020, a judge in Lille, France, authorized the infiltration of the EncroChat servers.[23] Intelligence and technical collaboration between the NCA, the National Gendarmerie and Dutch police culminated in gaining access to messages after the National Gendarmerie put a "technical tool" on EncroChat's servers in France.[20][22][1] The malware allowed them to read messages before they were sent and record lock screen passwords. Messages could be read by law enforcement beginning in April.[12] EncroChat estimated that around 50 percent of devices in Europe were affected in June 2020.[1][17]

[-] youngGoku@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

OK thank you.

This is why we need to use a decentralized, end-to-end encrypted messaging service.

The gubment can not be trusted to keep their hands out of the cookie jar.

[-] DarkenLM@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago

True E2EE? Only if you get the key. If they have a backdoor, then it's trivial.

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

There are ways:

The encryption protocol might have a weakness
One or both of the devices might be compromised
The actual application design might have a weakness
The actual application might be conpromised (i.e. on purpose rather than an unknown design flaw)
The mechanism for generating the actual keys might have a weakeness (for example, for a while the symetrical key generation for HTTPS in the Mozilla browser was a lot less random than it was supposed to be so those connections were a lot easier to crack)
The mechanism for distributing the keys might have a weakness

Ultimatelly the one trully safe encryption mechanism is the One Time Pad, and that requires a key as long as the message (hence why seldom used) distributed in a safe way (for starters, never over a public network) and there's still the whole "compromised device" and "compromise application" risks (though implementing the One Time Pad protocol is stupidly simple)

this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023

156 points (95.9% liked)

THE POLICE PROBLEM

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The police problem is that police are policed by the police. Cops are accountable only to other cops, which is no accountability at all.

99.9999% of police brutality, corruption, and misconduct is never investigated, never punished, never makes the news, so it's not on this page.

When cops are caught breaking the law, they're investigated by other cops. Details are kept quiet, the officers' names are withheld from public knowledge, and what info is eventually released is only what police choose to release — often nothing at all.

When police are fired — which is all too rare — they leave with 'law enforcement experience' and can easily find work in another police department nearby. It's called "Wandering Cops."

When police testify under oath, they lie so frequently that cops themselves have a joking term for it: "testilying." Yet it's almost unheard of for police to be punished or prosecuted for perjury.

Cops can and do get away with lawlessness, because cops protect other cops. If they don't, they aren't cops for long.

The legal doctrine of "qualified immunity" renders police officers invulnerable to lawsuits for almost anything they do. In practice, getting past 'qualified immunity' is so unlikely, it makes headlines when it happens.

All this is a path to a police state.

In a free society, police must always be under serious and skeptical public oversight, with non-cops and non-cronies in charge, issuing genuine punishment when warranted.

Police who break the law must be prosecuted like anyone else, promptly fired if guilty, and barred from ever working in law-enforcement again.

That's the solution.

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