Police could lawfully use bulk surveillance techniques to access messages from encrypted communications platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal, following a ruling by the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), a court has heard.
The headline is a little misleading. The actual ruling is that police can obtain warrants to install surveillance malware on phones when they have evidence the owner is using it to communicate about crimes.
Could malware be installed without access to the physical phone? How would this be achieved. Is it with a backdoor from the phone manufacturer or infected somehow from the sim card service provider.
Depending on circumstances it can be done remotely in different ways AFAIK using things like IMSI Catchers, malicious and sometimes invisible SMS messages, and maybe spearfishing or other methods. Or a combination of things, leveraging different weaknesses of the phone in question.
And because this could just enable government bodies to fuck around with spying, that’s why usually you have to get a warrant for this kinda stuff on the grounds of probable cause.
This is much much harder though, and would risk exposing the vulnerabilities they are using, so they likely won’t use these methods unless it’s higher profile and involves some higher up govt entities. Your normal street crime cop shop won’t be able to do this.
Likely as not, person charged with crime is in custody. Police force person to unlock phone, then police install malware and wait for comms to come in.
You’d have to be a real idiot to keep using the same phone after the police arrested you and forced you to unlock it
Well, people doing crimes aren’t known for their intelligence.
This. Even I would be too paranoid to keep using a phone (or other device for that matter) that the police confiscated before.
Can be done remotely on any mobile platform. Look up pegasus if you’re interested.
Let’s be honest Google is Americas attempt to control the Internet completely, they appeared straight after they declared the echolen project ended. The odds on them being a real company straight after that must at least quadruple any bet.
I’ll be honest I use Google I think everyone does but I’ve always been aware their more FBI, CIA than an actual search engine.
I myself don’t have much to hide and I’ll probably keep using them for now, but if I was an American I’d avoid them like the plague.
Tell me you haven’t read the article without telling me you haven’t read the article.
Also you seem to have no clue what you’re talking about.
I don’t use Google. I haven’t used Google in… I dunno, a decade? They offer no services that are better than the competition. In fact, the only quality thing they ever made was Google maps.
And now openstreetmaps is just as good – worse for car, better for biking and walking, really depends for public transit
worse for car,
Hard disagree. Find an error in Google Maps and submit a correction… My house lives on one such error. I’ve submitted probably 200-300 attempts to fix it… Google Maps just refuses. My address is fixed/correct in literally every other map software out there.
Google maps sucks if they can’t even be bothered to have an accurate map. People get sent 20 miles away if they strictly type my street address into google.
