this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Privacy

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Happy to see a privacy-focused carrier, and it has better policies than any other carrier out there. But founder is formerly from Palantir and there’s a lot of VC money behind it (not inherently a problem, just flagging).

Thoughts?

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[–] gravitywell@sh.itjust.works 11 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Because they literally operated it as a honeypot and gave police full access to chats while advertising to criminals that it was safe.

EncroChat first came to the attention of the media when it was revealed that high-profile criminals Mark Fellows and Steven Boyle had been using the encrypted devices to communicate during the May 2018 gangland murder of John Kinsella in Rainhill, England.[16][9][17] The service resurfaced in the media during the summer of 2020 after law enforcement agencies announced that they had infiltrated the encrypted network and investigative journalist Joseph Cox, who had been reviewing EncroChat for months, published an exposé in Vice Motherboard

[–] ivn@jlai.lu 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Where did you read that they gave police full access? I thought they were hacked.

[–] gravitywell@sh.itjust.works 8 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

That's even worse then because they didn't even have a secure network from start. Be it willful ignorance or intentional assistance, its still a honeypot. This was a huge "I told you so" by a lot of the dark net community when it happened, a lot of people called it WAY ahead of time.

Encrochat isn't the only example, so i may have conflated it with one of these other Honeypot operations: ANOM, Phantom Secure , Ghost , SkyECC

You might be able to see a pattern here. People who actually want security and anonymity know that you can't trust those things over to a corporation or a bunch of tech broligarchs, they will either betray you intentionally or due to their incompetence.

[–] ivn@jlai.lu 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I don't see how being hacked make it "still a honeypot".

[–] gravitywell@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

because it was being used to attract criminals into thinking it was a safe and legitimate service, while under theee surface it was relaying all the messages to law enforcement.