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I would think that, surely, it should be possible to establish a secure method? It's one thing to not be able to use existing platforms, but an appropriately dedicated group could probably spin up their own encrypted messaging system?
Edit: ok, I see what you mean, they used the simple fact that the protesters used signal as part of the evidence against them. I was thinking in terms of securing your plans rather than protecting actors, which is of course also vital.
Screenshots are still a thing. The tradeoffs are real for secure messaging. At a certain point, someone has to see that packet A got sent from IP x.x.x.x to IP y.y.y.y. beyond that, metadata is hard to keep safe. Who messaged who when. The ways to make it more obscure, more encrypted, but at the end of the day you still have vectors that information can escape through. The biggest one is that a person you send message to takes a screenshot. Even if you secure everything so so much, you can't make it so someone can read it but can't record it. Take a picture of it, etc.
Check out briar, it does a pretty good job for a messenger, but tradeoffs are tradeoffs (e.g. recipient must be online to deliver messages). Also simplex ive heard good things about.
I mean, if the person you're communicating with is directly compromised in that way, you're fucked. They could just as easily be brought in to testify against you directly, or report on your activities to intelligence agencies, or whatever you're concerned about, no screen capture necessary. That's not really a technology issue.
they can pwn phones without finding a benedict arnold or infiltrating the group. or get over-the-shoulder from a surveillance camera, good thing we don't have millions of those around everywhere.
Re screenshots, people dont have to be compromised to take screenshots. "This message will go away and I want to remember it cause my memory isnt that good, I'll screenshot it". But yea if someone is directly working against you you're fucked. Most issues are social, not technological
gotta do your coordination in an online game and speak in code.
or stomach the division and you can probably just openly talk about shooting some government buildings.
Many people aren’t aware that their notifications are also, by default, delivered through cloud servers. The notification message contents might be exposed through that. Though privacy focused apps like Signal do employ some attempt at countermeasure by sending blank pings which then trigger an on-device retrieve of the message.
Yup. Notifications are such a shitshow. Everything with tech is a shitshow. The solutions to problems create their own problems (e.g. p2p to avoid servers, but now you have to have your device online to receive messages, so you put an always on device on your home network to always get messages (basically a bounce device), but now you have an unsecured device that isnt on your person so if your threat involves police reading your messages well gosh you better hope they dont break in to your home. Next thing you know youre writing a bash script to constantly detect changes in the accelerometer, and when they exceed a certain threshold delete all messages and
dd -if /dev/null -of /dev/sda, and then youre hooking it up to a random unsecured telnet connection to a seismology center to make sure its actually cops busting down your door and not an earthquake so you dont accidentally lose your messages, and finally you get it all set up perfectly and dont put it on the table gingerly enough and trigger the script, wiping the drive, and you give up and then it turns out your friend uses an old unsecured android version so the cops just got all the group messages from a random traffic stop and now your in jail awaiting trial for terrorism and ok ok at this point I'm just being hyperbolic and taking the piss a little.)LOL this was great, TBH.
Yeah true, it is possible, I shouldn't say never use digital comms, I mainly meant if you want to be sure that the message won't be intercepted or read back to you in court. Even if you have your own encrypted system, a person could be compromised and share the messages with authorities, or there could be some kind of other monitoring like a camera watching your screen. I just have trouble trusting that there isn't some kind of backdoor that could expose you that we don't know about yet. I doubt these people were thinking it was going to be that serious of an event though, it sounds like it wasn't exactly that planned out.
Also worth considering the precedent here that just using encrypted messaging was used as evidence against them, which is really super fucked.
I dont really understand why there is discussion of alternative methods of encoded comms. Any or all of them are equally as "suspicious".
code might be better than encryption for a while. imagine a lawyer trying to explain to a jury that "girl dinner 6-7 mogging the rizzless" really meant blowing up ted cruz's house
Damn it, my cell has to get a new code now. Thanks a lot.
this is completely unrealistic. Its hard enough to find a few people with whom one has sufficient agreement and trust to organize with. A requirement that one or more of those people being competent enough to write their own encrypted messaging system from scratch? And everyone is able or willing to sideload it on their devices without introducing some other security issue. That isn't a matter of commitment, it is a matter of luck. The kind of luck which is unevenly distributed through geography, class, gender, race etc.
All that aside from the fact that even if you are organizing in an elite area and this is plausible (if not likely), it does absolutely nothing to address the issue at hand. I just read the linked article, is there another one that indicates a technical problem with signal?
Every comment in this thread proposing technical solutions, it sounds like living in a comic book or something. We should start passing a hat around now for commissary donations to all the hexbears who are about to be locked up because they thought they could outsmart fascism with some clever python or kotlin.
For reference, nation state level actors still fuck this up. And expecting a group of <10 people to be able to outperform the CIA is a bit of a stretch.