| ▲ | paxys 7 hours ago |
| Pretty ironic that they got caught after going out of their way to buy secure phones and use secure messaging services when an off-the-shelf iPhone and Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram would have made them 100% untraceable. |
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| ▲ | cwmma 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| One of the features the phones had was that they could be remotely deleted and were locked down to prevent other apps on them. So an off the shelf iphone with signal is going to be vulnerable to having the device itself hacked via text message, bluetooth, or something else in a way the Sky ECC phones theoretically can't be, so it's not necessarily a slam dunk. |
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| ▲ | paxys 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | - Buy a cheap android phone from a no-name Chinese OEM. - Run a basic script to disable app installs, phone calls and some other features. - Never update the OS. Don't do any security patching. - Write your own encrypted messaging app with your own crypto. Don't get any external reviews or audits. - Resell this as a Sky ECC phone with some marketing dollars labeling it as "secure" and "private". What do you think is more hackable, this or a regular iPhone/Samsung Galaxy/Pixel? | | |
| ▲ | michaelt 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Consider the following two offers: A cheap netbook from a no-name Chinese OEM, running weird software you've never heard of named 'TAILS' which doesn't auto-update or anything, and which the makers say is very secure. A cheap phone from a no-name Chinese OEM, running weird software you've never heard of named 'Sky ECC' which doesn't auto-update or anything, and which the makers say is very secure. You've got to be fairly knowledgeable to appraise the two options correctly. | | |
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| ▲ | asveikau 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | These are common requirements for a corporate phone. Remote wipe is provided by both Android and iPhone iirc even to end users. A stock android phone, a knowledgeable user could already remove a bunch of stock apps. |
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| ▲ | mhitza 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Probably Signal would have been a safe bet. Telegram doesn't do encryption by default (on group messages? Been a year or two since I've used it). And Facebook complies with law enforcement agencies, and I don't think it's unreasonable for them to have a feature flags to selectively and transparently disable encryption for some participants if need be. |
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| ▲ | joering2 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Facebook certainly likes to at least have sense to know what you are conversating about. Sometime in 2016 we and my buddy abroad got our accounts frozen "due to security reasons" at exact same time; what we were doing is having fun with FB Messenger and sending each other PGP-encrypted messages. This least about 2 months and my buddy is Egyptian, so I am pretty sure at some point FB said "we don't know what they chat about and enough is enough". I got my account recovered after multiple layers of verification including video-call to hold up my ID done by third-party ... my friend never gotten his reinstated. | | |
| ▲ | int_19h 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Facebook definitely has some kind of chat monitoring and real-time censorship in place. For example, I once couldn't send a message in private chat if it included a link to one of the online weed stores. Remove the link, and it goes through just fine. Put the link there, and the thing just hangs and errors out with no coherent explanation. |
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| ▲ | dist-epoch 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Reminds me of an organization buying pagers since they are more "secure". |
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| ▲ | anthk 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Or just a damn netbook (i386, Atom, pre-IntelME) with Email and GPG. |
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| ▲ | loceng 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I suppose the hope is that if relatively good people, maybe bad actors but with certain limits, if they get exposed to or inadvertently the "opportunity" to be involved in higher orders of magnitude of bad - that they may then act as a light that helps create cracks in the armour to expose such horrific behaviour? |
