[Cryptography] Sky Global Indictment, March 12, 2021

[Peter Fairbrother]

On 16/03/2021 15:11, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:
> On March 15, 2021, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
> 
>> Could there be a Fourteenth Amendment defense in the US? Telephone

[...]

> I think the Napster case is more akin to what Fairbrother is reaching for, 

I didn't bring up the 14th amendment, but I doubt there is a case there 
- for a start it is about what States can do, and it is the Feds who are 
doing the doing here.

Nor is there a defense of being a common carrier, the services are 
limited in scope and not open to anyone.

My original point was that the cops will try to prevent these services 
from operating by any means they can use - whether that is by breaking 
the crypto or breaking the operation of the service or any other 
(presumable legal or at least semi-legal) means to hand.

but
> the difference with regard to Sky Global and others has to do with allegation
> of complicity in the illegal activity on their service.  

Yup, that is the main point at issue. Plus, even if not proven the 
allegation of complicity is enough to destroy the service.


It's a bit curious that the cops seemingly do not try harder to break 
message secrecy then do the classic bodyguard-of-lies attack, pretending 
messages are secure while creaming off high-grade intel - they have done 
this for up to 3 months or so in a couple of cases, but that is not very 
long.

Perhaps it is because they are Policemen not TLAs, with a Police rather 
than a secret agent mindset, and a bunch of different Policemen from 
different forces as well - the desire to take action before the secret 
is exposed, taking into account the possibility of betrayal, whether for 
criminal reasons or simply through excess enthusiasm in one of the other 
Police forces, may make long-term covert message security breaking 
impractical.



But it is all about the vanity of criminals anyway - these services 
typically cost $4,000 per year plus another $1,000 for the phone, and 
you can only use them to contact other people who are on the service, 
many/most of whom are criminals (though there were some celeb customers 
in the early services).

That exclusive connectivity is about all users get for their money.

There may be an apparent small gain in anonymity through the use of 
nyms, and in traffic hiding through the message service if that can be 
trusted, but both are ineffective against a State-level opponent.

Plus, hiding who you are talking to doesn't make you inconspicuous if 
everybody you could be talking to is a criminal.

Nail sticking up anyone? No wonder they get hammered.

What a bunch of criminals should do is mix their traffic with as much 
other traffic as they can, and make it very hard to distinguish... but 
that means no dedicated servers, and no $4,000 per year per phone fees.




And if you are charging $4,000 per year for a service which would 
normally cost $100 or less it is hard to argue that you are not in 
complicity with the criminal actions of your users - even if you don't 
know what those actions are, or who the users are. What do the users get 
for their $3,900 a year apart from your complicity?


Peter Fairbrother