
A Phone Company Run by Drug Traffickers - joosters
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/wjwbmm/inside-the-phone-company-secretly-run-by-drug-traffickers
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jchw
There’s some serious dishonesty going on here, trying to portray end to end
crypto as some kind of horrible thing only criminals use. Yet I’d imagine the
combined userbases of WhatsApp, Signal and Apple iMessage make up the majority
of all message traffic worldwide, excluding countries that restrict internet
traffic significantly. For example, you can’t subpoena to get the messages in
_any_ of these... this is the same for all E2E chats.

It is not a bug that police and governments can not access and hear all of
your “offline” communications. It is likewise not a bug that police and
governments can not access and see all of your online communications.

This could be an interesting story if half of it wasn’t just unabashed
fearmongering.

I look forward to going to prison some day for dual booting my computer
because some criminals did it on phones once!

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colejohnson66
I expected better reporting from Vice

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knolax
Expect nothing from VICE. Sensationalism is their specialty.

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Thorentis
I wonder how many of these "secure phone" companies - if not being run by drug
cartels themselves like this in this instance - are actually being run as
honeypots by the FBI/DEA? Would be a great idea if they are so popular in the
crime world. A bit like how Tor sites are run as honeypots too.

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stebann
They may be running, no doubt on that. But if they don't "scatter" their
operations and try to get monopoly or oligopoly of the market they'll in
trouble because nobody will trust this "companies".

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throwaway8435
On a similar note, I wonder, what kind of ERP software do modern organized
crime use? Do they use SAAS? Regular commercial software or FOSS installed on
private cloud?

In other words, does the dark web have a SAAS Salesforce equivalent for the
bad guys?

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throwaway-ggfds
Homegrown on private clouds. Rackets have moved from offline security to
online security. Large mafias are highly sophisticated tech wise.

~~~
55555
You're anonymous anyway, you may as well tell us more. ;)

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seibelj
I know a guy who was deep in the online steroids world like 10 years ago. He
would find clients on body building forums. There was eventually a bust and he
didn’t get nabbed although many other associates of his did. He couldn’t
believe at the time that a bust could have happened given how minor that was
compared to narcotics.

The most interesting part of the story was that during the time he was under
investigation he was completely overcome with fear and worry, so bad he was
vomiting blood. Once he got through it without any charges he completely got
out of drug dealing and became a software engineer.

I don’t think people who dabble in crime truly understand how nerve wracking
it is until something really bad happens. Effective criminals are sociopaths
who don’t experience fear the same way as most people. It’s so much better to
work in legal industries.

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baobabKoodaa
There's probably some medical reason for vomiting blood, I don't think
paranoia/other psychological causes could explain that.

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geofft
Isn't it pretty common to get ulcers from merely stress / "psychological
causes" and also pretty standard for ulcers to cause you to vomit up blood? I
don't think this is strange....

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rollulus
The Dutch police managed to crack similar phones a while ago [1] since crypto
is difficult to implement. It gave them good insights.

[1]: [https://cacm.acm.org/news/229428-dutch-police-fight-crime-
by...](https://cacm.acm.org/news/229428-dutch-police-fight-crime-by-cracking-
pgp-phones/fulltext)

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JohnJamesRambo
Can someone tell me why a special custom phone would be necessary? What could
it possibly give you that Signal and a fingerprint lock doesn’t? Is it just a
case of criminals not understanding the technology? I’d actually be more
suspicious of a phone that has been hacked apart by a shady company.

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dmix
Spies would never use obviously custom phones for this reason. The goal is to
blend in, not stand out. Especially when the adversary has total network
access.

As the CIA learned in Lebanon when their network got rolled because Hezbollah
noticed certain phones left off most of the time except the occasional use
before being turned off the network again - very unusual behaviour which
exposed their trade raft.

The majority of drug dealers don't face this level of threat, depending on the
country, where any level of encryption and careful phone protocols would go a
long way. But the very big ones will as the bigger agencies have much broader
reach and the NSA shares with DEA all the time.

WhatsApp was probably the best thing to happen to drug dealers in a long time.
But most of them are too dumb to know that and people will always be the
greatest weakness regardless of all the fancy tech.

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chadlavi
I wish there was any momentum to offer that level of privacy and security for
us normal consumers.

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hnuser66
This article is atrocious yellow journalism stoking fear about encryption.
Yes, people that used to traffick drugs started selling phones, possibly using
their old network for sales. And yes, these bad dudes sent some thugs to
threaten and assault a business competitor.

But what were the capabilities of these scary, criminal kingpin, super secret,
drug-trafficking phones? "[They] run software for sending encrypted emails or
messages, and use their own server infrastructure for routing communications.
Sometimes the devices have the microphone, camera, and GPS functionality
removed. Some also have a dual-boot mode, where powering on the device as
normal will show an innocuous menu screen with no sensitive information. But
if certain buttons are held down when turning the phone on, it will reveal a
secret file system containing the user’s encrypted text messages and other
communications. With these tweaks, the ordinary methods for law enforcement to
intercept messages are cut-off—police can’t simply get an ordinary phone tap
or subpoena messages from a company; the texts are typically only available in
a readable form on the users’ devices."

These should be the capabilities of every phone on planet earth! They used off
the shelf phones, CopperheadOS, extra security configuration, data only SIMs,
and a layer of anonymization since the customer didn't have their name on the
SIM, and probably a custom app for the deniability mode. That's it.

The lede of the article is about a reporter's murder that could have had
something to do with _any_ of the reporter's many organized crime subjects,
not just the phone company. He just happened to be hanging out with the MPC
guy that night. It's not illegal to sell encryption. I don't know why the
author here is trying so hard sensationalize encrypted phones as having to do
with murder, fear, strip clubs, drugs, etc. -- I hope it's just clicks.

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55555
> data only SIMs

How does this help make the phone owner anonymous? Can't you still do
triangulation with a data-only SIM?

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gruez
Presumably the SIMs were anonymously bought/registered. There's no link to the
user. If you knew the drug kingpin was using a particular sim/phone
(IMSI/IEMI), you can track it, but that's like looking for a needle in a
haystack (no intercepted texts/calls to go by).

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throwGuardian
IMEI is transmitted in every packet communicated with a phone, not just calls
and texts.

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Red10
Gotta appreciate the sheer research and length of this article... Can't read
it all.

