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Corrupt UK police analyst gets prison time for tipping off a friend that encrypted messaging app had been compromised (1ft.io)

submitted 1 year ago by DougHolland@lemmy.world to c/thepoliceproblem@lemmy.world

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[-] ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 125 points 1 year ago

The analyst told her friend that the police could access what was thought of as private. That was the crime. Being honest about what the police can do.

The police also say that having the ability to breach privacy is key to keeping people safe but there is no mention of when info secretly scraped from the unsuspecting prevented other unsuspecting people from morbid circumstances.

This whole event looks like the cops are big mad they will now be asked for accountability on another method of investigation. Imagine having to answer for your actions!

[-] Chouxfleur@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

To be fair to the plod that's not the only thing she's being charged with.

She's specifically been leaking information about ongoing investigations which for an LEO is a big no-no.

Mottram drove to Kay and Bennett's house to warn them about the police file on Kay – which as we know, and she didn't, was deliberately bogus.

If she'd just told people that EncroChat was insecure then she'd have plausible deniability, but she's clearly pretty involved in trying to assist people in keeping clear of the law (which is pretty cut and dry in the eyes of the law - regardless of what you think of the morality of it all).

Mottram bought weed from a dealer whose phone number was saved in her mobile phone. She also told Bennett about a murder file she had seen on her boss's desk, and took selfies with her work computer visible and showing an "official sensitive" document.

A few other dodgy bits here too, again, very much in breach of her terms of employment which, for LEA employees can get sticky pretty rapidly.

All of this is quite apart from whether you think the fuzz should have access to private citizens communications (which I should be clear I don't). But she's not just an innocent person who just told her mates that they shouldn't use a specific service to discuss breaking the law.

[+] HeartyBeast@kbin.social -9 points 1 year ago

The analyst told her friend that the police could access what was thought of as private. That was the crime. Being honest about what the police can do.

Do you suggest police analysts should be fully transparent all the time, as in "Hey bob, the cops know you are going to raid the bank tomorrow, better re-arrange"?

[-] ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 40 points 1 year ago

Yes. The police, like any government agency, needs to state both the scope of its work and provide metrics for how taxpayers can expect their money spent. This expenditure should include how it achieve its goals and what progress should look like. Then let the people judge the methods are consistent with public expectations of accountability.

Police have repeatedly shown an incapability to behave, respect, or function as a person who has to be responsible for their actions. They cannot be allowed to operate without oversight.

[-] HeartyBeast@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago

The police, like any government agency, needs to state both the scope of its work and provide metrics for how taxpayers can expect their money spent.

That would be in the charter as set out by the UK parliament. It doesn't include the requirement that suspects be tipped off about ongoing investigations.

[-] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

Which is not at all something being suggested.

[-] jonne@infosec.pub 10 points 1 year ago

They should be open about how investigative tools work, and what the current privacy expectations are, yes. In the end they have to present their evidence in court, and that includes things like this.

[-] PineRune@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Should they prevent a crime or watch it happen knowing they could have stopped it just to get an arrest? What will happen in cases of murder?

[-] chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago

Allowing the police to make up the rules as they go and then justify them later is not the answer to a civilized society. That's how you end up with a police state. We have privacy laws and basic human rights for a reason. If the cops want to circumvent them, then the laws change first. We are not a society that should accept shooting first and asking questions later.

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

One of the reasons the Brexiters - who are still in Government - openly stated for Leaving the EU was so that they could leave the European Convention Of Human Rights, since being a signatory of that Convention is a requirement of EU membership.

The British "elites" are very much not believers in the riff-raff having Rights that superceed their mechanisms for controlling the masses if there is an ultimate genuinelly independent enforcer of those Rights (such as the European Court of Human Rights) - the most favored control mechanisms in the UK have an appearence of fairness whilst being de facto designed for operating differently or being easy to subvert, so a trully independent Human Rights mechanism whose judges didn't went to the same very expensive and very select private schools as the English power elites is borderline unnacceptable (clearly in the case of Brexiter leaders, absolutelly so) for said power elites.

PS: All this to say that in Britain the problem is a lot deeper than merelly the police, who to a large extent are just hired enforcers in a system designed to "keep people in their place", a mindset probably derived from the horror of the British Elites at what happenned next door in France during the Revolution Française (the political British system is one of the ones in Europe whoch has change the least for over a century).

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.world 39 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Just want to remind everybody that when the Snowden Revelations came out, not only was the UK's NSA-equivalent (the GCHQ) more abusive and extensive in its civil society surveilance that the NSA, but whilst the US government actually walked back on some of the abuses, the UK government simply retroactivelly legalized it and probably issued a bunch of D-Notices (the UK's Press censorship scheme) to quiet it down (certainly the UK press went real quiet on it really fast).

Also the chief editor at the British newspaper that brough out the Snowden Revelations - The Guardian - was kicked out some months later and that newspaper has not mentioned that subject since.

The country is way more authoritarian than people outside of it think: just because the "upper" classes are generally trained to be posh and project a gentlemany image (that and being inducted into the "old boys network" are the main selling points of private schools in the UK, curiously called "public schools" over there even though they're £30k per year per pupil) doesn't mean they don't think everybody else are plebes that need to be kept in their place and share the "lower" classes' belief that foreigners are inferior.

[-] Squizzy@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

So many famous Brits are private school grads, seeing John Oliver and Richard Ayoade went to the same schools as the likes of BoJo and Thatcher is insane. So much of their public face is made up of this tiny population of people.

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Well, if I remember it correctly 11% of the population attends Public Schools, though the most exclusive ones are attended by a tiny fraction of the population which are overwhelmingly represented in the Media, amongst High Court judges and in Politics.

The system that preserves power and wealth across generations through limiting opportunities for the rest also includes Cambridge and Oxford, were public school educated students used to be 70% not long ago (though nowadays its better and and they're only about half) even though they're 11% of all pupils, no doubt due the unmeritocratic selection process which relies on interviews rather than independent educational assessment (one of my acquainces was refused entry into an Architecture Degree because, as he was told, "he did not went to the right school", an impossible barrier to entry for most, more so for somebody of Arabic ancestry who had grown up in a Single Parent home because his father died when he was a child).

[-] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 38 points 1 year ago

According to the NCA, Mottram told Jonathan Kay, 39, the police were monitoring people's encrypted EncroChat conversations, and tipped him off that the cops had intel on him presumably from his use of the app.

She basically tipped off crooks who were selling weapons illegally according to the article.

While I think that cops shouldn't have a backdoor to an encrypted messaging system or access to any messages without a warrant, this woman is also a big piece of shit who deserves to be in jail.

[-] Afghaniscran@feddit.uk 16 points 1 year ago

I just read the article and I missed that somehow. I thought she tipped off her mate who was selling weed and said that they were focussing on arms deals for now but be careful.

[-] TheaoneAndOnly27@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

She tipped off a guy who was selling weed, and that guy tipped off a guy who might be selling arms? Or is being reassured that the police are only focused on firearms currently. The wording was kind of weird in their text message.

[-] Afghaniscran@feddit.uk 2 points 1 year ago

I agree, I'm not really sure myself. I took it as reassuring him that they were focussing on arms but you could be right that he was tipping off his arms-dealing mate.

[-] halfempty@kbin.social 19 points 1 year ago

I don't think that what she did was wrong. I think that the police hacking a person's device is wrong.

[-] Whirling_Cloudburst@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

This is why more people should use Signal.

[-] ThePyroPython@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Bold of you to assume that GCHQ & NSA hasn't already compromised Signal.

[-] TWeaK@lemm.ee 13 points 1 year ago

Pretty unlikely. It's more likely they would find some way into one device and then replace its Signal app with a compromised version.

[-] GBU_28@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

Very unlikely they cracked it's encryption, but they can just crack the "human" part. Unattended device, patterns, contacts, etc

[-] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

Did you just say what the comment already said, worded differently? Isn’t this what Reddit bots used to do for karma?

[-] GBU_28@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

What the fuck are you talking about? I saw your comment and replied

[-] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 year ago

Is it "corrupt" or corrupt? Because there is a difference, and the deference shown in the article is part of the problem.

[-] sik0fewl@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The former. It is a quote and does not seem like corruption to me.

Edit: it's also quoted in the headline, but OP changed it.

[-] DougHolland@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago

Absolutely agreed, and I swiped those quote marks on purpose. :)

[-] slurpeesoforion@startrek.website 6 points 1 year ago

If police in general could be trusted, they'd still need to fuck off.

[-] youngGoku@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

How can end-to-end encryption be compromised though?

[-] 000999@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 year ago

The investigation accelerated in early 2019 after receiving EU funding.[2] At the end of January 2020, a judge in Lille, France, authorized the infiltration of the EncroChat servers.[23] Intelligence and technical collaboration between the NCA, the National Gendarmerie and Dutch police culminated in gaining access to messages after the National Gendarmerie put a "technical tool" on EncroChat's servers in France.[20][22][1] The malware allowed them to read messages before they were sent and record lock screen passwords. Messages could be read by law enforcement beginning in April.[12] EncroChat estimated that around 50 percent of devices in Europe were affected in June 2020.[1][17]

[-] youngGoku@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

OK thank you.

This is why we need to use a decentralized, end-to-end encrypted messaging service.

The gubment can not be trusted to keep their hands out of the cookie jar.

[-] DarkenLM@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

True E2EE? Only if you get the key. If they have a backdoor, then it's trivial.

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There are ways:

The encryption protocol might have a weakness
One or both of the devices might be compromised
The actual application design might have a weakness
The actual application might be conpromised (i.e. on purpose rather than an unknown design flaw)
The mechanism for generating the actual keys might have a weakeness (for example, for a while the symetrical key generation for HTTPS in the Mozilla browser was a lot less random than it was supposed to be so those connections were a lot easier to crack)
The mechanism for distributing the keys might have a weakness

Ultimatelly the one trully safe encryption mechanism is the One Time Pad, and that requires a key as long as the message (hence why seldom used) distributed in a safe way (for starters, never over a public network) and there's still the whole "compromised device" and "compromise application" risks (though implementing the One Time Pad protocol is stupidly simple)

this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023

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THE POLICE PROBLEM

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All this is a path to a police state.

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