Trojan Shield: How the FBI Secretly Ran a Phone Network for Criminals

[LadyVoltaire]

It remains to be seen how many of these cases will hold up in the courts of the various countries involved, given the possibility that this could be interpreted as a massive, warrantless violation of privacy rights. Unless the prosecutors can prove that all users of the software were necessarily using it for criminal purposes, then shouldn't the inclusion of a backdoor which collects everything everybody says and sends it to the police be an enormous rights breach? These will not be slam-dunk prosecutions, that's for sure.

Plus they will have to prove that the person who owns or in possession of the phone .. is the actual ID of person who wrote the messages!

 

[4DQSAR]

I note the OP was a year before French law enforcement hacked 'Encrochat' and Operation Ventric in the UK resulted in 746 arrests.

But honestly - one guy claimed he worked in The City of London i.e. he was expert on laundering money. Went on to claim he had millions and his side-hustle had made him more millions.

And yet he couldn't stop himself from posting a photograph of the extremely rare Ferrari he had purchased with the proceeds. On one hand I guess it is a form of self-advertizing. But on the other hand, all the police had to do was to look at the specialist auctions that had taken place in the preceeding few months.

It turned out that while he was indeed wealthy, he owned a trucking business where, besides the ease of moving money/drugs/arms or whatever, there is still a lot of business conducted in cash. Someone who owns their own rig and decides to retire might prefer to sell for cash so the tax man won't see it. So he felt the need to lie to total strangers. That said, not the handsome beast he apparently suggested he was.

But who on earth trusts ANY digital platform? Law enforcement can find the carrier and apply for a warrent to use OTA reprograming of the SIM. So all of those fancy passwords and hidden apps mean nothing. An applet that just tracks numbers called can lead to more warrents for more OTA.