Velveeta: "beware Operation Sudden Fall" [Telecom]

snipped-for-privacy@telecom-digest.org wrote in :

My best guess from reading several versions of the message you refer to: it is a hippie who got all excited when he saw news that the police can monitor text messages, he collected a few links to existing options to encrypt your text message traffic and got those out to the world in order to make everyone aware of this breach of privacy and hoping everyone would switch to encrypted messaging.

Maybe making his encrypted messages about buying dope be less noticable in all that encrypted traffic.

The random signatures and the usage of different usenet servers for injecting the message do suggest that it is someone who knows usenet.

I'm not thinking 'pro usenet spammer'.

I visited one of the advertised sites. That is not a spammer site. I can find out the domain owner, it is not registered via a shady registrar in a country known for spam, and it has a matching registration for the IP also in a clean network neighbourhood.

A (GSM) cell phone has encryption in itself in order to work. For applications to use it they would need to be symbian or java applications with access to message sending/receiving functions.

protection against unreasonable search?

I am not a lawyer, but my thought would be that SMS by nature is a private communication between two unique phone endpoints and should therefore be considered private communications.

without a search warrant?

I am not a lawyer and not a US citizen but my personal view is that any democratic government should always aim for maximum privacy of its citizens and should only breach the privacy of specific citizens when there is a reasonable and verifiably reason to do so, and be willing to explain to that citizen afterwards why his/her privacy was broken.

What I think happened that the text messages were sent out when the sender was already under investigation for drug dealing so search warrants were all in place. Which means the police just were very surprised at the stupidity of openly mentioning the drugdeals in text messages. A lot of police work is based on babbling (or in modern times: text-babbling) self-incriminating which is why phone taps are so popular with the police.

Koos

I suppose you're right, although I can't help but wonder if someone is touting SMS encryption as a roundabout way of pumping a common underlying technology which is in use by all the sites mentioned.

But is it AES, or something less robust? If it's AES, then the encryption is believable, but if it's a less robust method, then it would make sense for someone to tout it via Velveeta.

I guess that's the part I find hard to believe: the notion that college students could be so stupid as to allegedly conduct a drug ring using _any_ electronic communication is bad enough, and if it's true, it speaks volumes about the hubris and arrogance some spoiled children exhibit. An indictment isn't a conviction, of course, so I'll leave that aspect to the courts.

My stumbling point is this Velveeta: it just doesn't track my notion of something a knowledgeable Internaut would do to protest what (s)he obviously feels is unwarranted (pun intended) monitoring. I _want_ there to be a commercial motive so that the effort makes sense.

I guess you're right: it's probably a futile gesture by someone who doesn't accept that police have a job to do.

Bill

It's something called A5. It's been cracked.

And in any case, it only protects you if the cell tower turns it on. You don't normally have any way to know. According to the above report, some GSM networks use the same key for 16 calls, which would make things easier for an over-the-air eavesdropper.

Dave