Comment by shamrockpreacher5@reddthat.com on US: Alaska man busted with 10,000+ child sex abuse images despite his many encrypted apps

Fuck this human

Tldr; Asshole used encrypted everything and Tor to create and spread csam. Government isn’t disclosing how they caught him

It’s better they don’t disclose it and catch more people doing the same.

I’m all for transparency but if that means less caught child molesters, I’m ok with a little obfuscation, even from the fucking pigs.

my guess is that a large number of tor exit nodes is run by government agencies.

Certainly some are. How many is an entertaining question.

.onions: am i a joke to you?

He didn’t use encrypted everything. He had a public telegram group chat in which he stored a lot of his material. Which, as many people in the comments on the article pointed out, is not encrypted, but is presented by telegram as if it is. That’s likely how they caught him.

To be clear, it’s encrypted*.

* If you enable it

Telegram groups are not E2E.

Chats are encrypted, but the servers hold the encryption keys (I believe).

There are one-to-one chats that are full e2e, but you have to enable it. And it has all sorts of compromises.

Qualifier: this is as dicumented by telegram. Since it’s not open source, we can’t really verify it

AFAIK chat contents are stored unencrypted on the server.

Recent events have taught me that only individual chats are encrypted*. Group chats don’t have that feature.

In telegram nothing is e2e encrypted unless you specifically ask it to be and when you do, it kills all the functionality that makes it better than others.

That’s what I said. The person I replied to said that all messages are encrypted* with the asterisk being only if you specifically enable it. I clarified that it doesn’t apply to group chats though. I don’t use Telegram so the loss of functionality is actually a bigger deal to me than the argument around E2EE. Can you explain what features are lost when you enable it? It’s a messaging app so I’m curious what you sacrifice for E2EE.

There is no point in encrypting a public group chat since anyone can join and decrypt it anyway.

It works well in Matrix, and you can restrict who joins on that platform.

If you restrict it, then it isn’t public. I’m not saying that encrypted group chats are useless. But if it is public and anyone can join anyway, then encryption adds no secrecy.

Right, I’m just saying that other platforms give you the option of E2EE group chats, which makes sense if you know your group will remain fixed to a certain size. For truly public groups, yeah, encryption just adds a lot of processing overhead without much benefit.

I, personally, would prefer a platform that gives me the option rather than doesn’t.

The secret chats feature isn’t between anyone I believe, it’s between two people. But I don’t actually know for certain because I’ve not looked into it beyond a cursory googling.

That said, you’d be correct in that just like any service out there, the moment you let random people join there’s no level of encryption that can keep your secrets secret.

They got it by running a honeypot exit node like they always do

Neither Tor nor end-to-end encrypted messengers will cover the endpoints. It’s possible that they caught him using good old fashioned detective work. You don’t need a software back door for that.

Please don’t talk about child predators, and use the term “back door” in the same sentence. It ain’t right…

we’re talking about encryption here, not…that. please get your mind out of the gutter

Tor was created by NSA, half of Tor servers are run by NSA, not that secure

Tor was created by the Naval Research Labs, and was released to the public because it is secure.

The problem is that if it’s only the CIA or DIA using it, it’s easy figure out who is using it and where. Make it global and now there is a lot of noise to separate out.

Yeah, the security of tor relies on the nodes being different, but when most of them are owned by the same person/government body the security go downhill, sadly i2p isn’t that popular, because every person is a node

Tor was created by the NRL, which is a part of the US Navy and Marine Corps.

Meh, I heard wrong them sorry

Well it probably wasn’t a Vic Mackey-style rubber hose attack, because it sounds like this chump is getting hauled into court.

If you distribute encrypted materials you also need to distribute a means of decryption. I’m willing to bet a honeypot was used to trick him into distributing his csam right to the government hinself.

True. Or it could have been a backdoor in his phone, or the full running browser in his sim card, or the backdoor into his CPU chips… Maybe they do old fashioned police work for these cases and only use the pegasus spyware for others?

Pretty silly to do anything illegal on a computer when we know how flawed they are, imo

Hey, could I get some info on the

Full running browser in his SIM card

Thing?

I’m quite curious and haven’t been able of finding anything on the internet about it

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US: Alaska man busted with 10,000+ child sex abuse images despite his many encrypted apps(arstechnica.com)

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