← Back to context

Comment by jeroenhd

15 days ago

Hamas switched from smartphones, with encrypted messengers to pagers, a communication device with encryption so weak it may as well not be there. Criminals get caught because they used plain phone calls and texts _all the time_. Hell, child abusers are regularly reported to the police because someone saw a suspicious picture on their phone when scrolling through the gallery. Crime and an understanding of cybersecurity don't necessarily overlap.

I agree that cloud services cannot be trusted to do encryption within their clients, but on platforms like iOS it's difficult to do automated backups using independent encryption. It's also quite difficult not to accidentally enable backups to these services because the setup flow for every phone guides you to hitting the "upload everything I do to Apple/Google".

To Apple's credit, while they normally store a copy of the encryption key, making most cloud encryption entirely useless, they do offer setting a custom key at least. GDrive and OneDrive sure don't.

3 comments

jeroenhd

Reply
rjmunro  15 days ago

I believe they switched to pagers because their location can't be tracked. Every pager message is broadcast across the whole country and the pagers just listen to all of them and only tell the owner about the ones meant for them.

A phone has to at least tell the nearest tower that it's within range so that the tower can know to send it messages. After that, when it get's a message it sends some sort of acknowledgement. In theory anyone can pick up those messages with a phased array or set of directional antennas and get a directional fix on the phone.

luqtas  15 days ago

there are dumb people out there but can you sum up (just talking about illegal drugs) an industry that makes $360 billion per year? Brazilian ghettos have army grade weapons like anti-aircraft missiles [0]

psychopathy is a mental disease who impair people to control their impulses/defected judgment; often these are permanent personality traits, which either will let them sit in a prison for the rest of their lives depending on what they did or they will be liberated if they get caught with a high chance of another incidence... search for papers/work from Kent Kiehl if you are interested in this type of stuff

[0] https://www.globalissues.org/news/2009/10/30/3330