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.
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.
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.
Well just recently researchers discovered a campaign installing backdoors on iPhones using a chain of several 0-day expoits or in this case using also 0-click exploits, where no interaction from a user is needed. However those attack chain are so advanced that practically normal law enforcement would never be able to do it. But theoretically yes some well equiped state actors are able to infect you without noticing.
If you are really intrested to see how advanced these attack are search for "project triangulation" or watch the recording from last years chaos computer conference: https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11859-operation_triangulation_what_you_get_when_attack_iphones_of_researchers#t=373
The court heard that the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 allows law enforcement to obtain a TEI warrant for a single investigation or operation, such as the covert monitoring of the activities of an identified organised crime group. However, the lawyers argued that a TEI warrant could not be used to monitor all users of a particular messaging service. It was not enough, they said, that the targets for surveillance were using a common technology “incidental to their suspected criminality”.
I think this is their point. The additional links are walled, but the assertion it sounds to me like they're making is that the ruling authorized them to hack and surveil an entire platform, rather than based on probable cause against specific individuals.
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.
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.