British man appears in court over bomb joke sent in private message

95 点作者 tommoor超过 1 年前

23 条评论

It sounds like he's being held liable for sending a private message that scared the people spying on him into arresting him unnecessarily.It never occurred to me that end to end encryption would eventually have the use case of preventing security services from scaring themselves and then blaming you for a false alarm...

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legitster超过 1 年前

> He said that the plane's pilot made an announcement, telling passengers that the fighter jets had been scrambled because of a distress signal that had been sent by mistake.> Mr Verma's message was picked up by the UK security services who flagged it to Spanish authorities while the easyJet plane was still in the air.> A court in Madrid heard it was assumed the message triggered alarm bells after being picked up via Gatwick's Wi-Fi network.Emphasis mine. Something is really fishy here. We know that a fighter escort was dispatched for this flight, but it sounds like no one is on record that his message is what actually triggered the escort or how they would have even found it.There's a non-zero chance that the Spanish authorities themselves do not know where the distress signal came from, and only found out about the message after they searched his phone. And they are trying to pin the cost of scrambling the jets on him when they really should be ringing up the UK government.

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tommoor超过 1 年前

I feel like they are being vague on how the message was sourced purposefully.It's a shame it's a kid that doesn't have the resources to fight this, the UK public has already been conditioned to expect that all their messages are being tracked and read it seems.

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lelag超过 1 年前

It's a really interesting story.The message was sent privately. After reading about Snapchat security at <a href="https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2016/files/11.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2016/files/11.pdf</a>, it's clear that even in the absence of E2E encryption, all message are sent to the Snapchat API using TLS and even if using a public airport Wifi, this message should not have been easy to intercept.This leaves only a few options about what is happening here:Option 1: Big Intel has totally broken TLS and can see all TLS traffic in the clear in real-timeLikelihood: very unlikely, I don't think this would stay secret for long.Option 2: Big Intel got itself a certificate for the Snapchat domains and use it to MITM Snapchat traffic.Likelihood: very possible but unlikely to be the source as I don't think they would use it too openly on random users as it's too easy to get noticed if used widely.Option 3: Snapchat is actually monitoring all messages and reported the message to authorities themselves. Alternatively, Big Intel is in bed with Snapchat and all message get processed by an intelligence system.Likelihood: I think this is the only explanation that makes sense.Since it would not be very good PR for Snapchat to admit that they are monitoring all messages, the authorities must have invented that airport wifi monitoring story. Who even use an airport wifi in their home country anyway... Pretty sure he had 4G and no need to use the crappy airport wifi.Anyway, that's the only way I can make sense of that story.

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curtis3389超过 1 年前

Accused of public disorder because the government read his private message. Seems legit.

gridspy超过 1 年前

Seems like charging people for what they write or say in a private setting is like ThoughtCrime.Monitoring all communications for keywords and reacting is going to throw up a lot of false positives, that is in the nature of casting a wide net. Persecuting the victims of this snooping (the defendant in this case) seems a bit harsh.

avg_dev超过 1 年前

i don't understand. i thought TLS or some other form of end-to-end encryption would prevent this sort of thing from happening. it seems like someone has access to the plaintext message other than the participants of the conversation.how does this happen? (i am not a snapchat user)not even to begin talking about the political ramifications...

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neom超过 1 年前

I guess Snapchat isn't E2EE. There are various articles online that say it is, but if you view their privacy stuff, the have nothing about it and in this video they say they share your private messages with law enforcement when required: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lj4xjCaCXU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lj4xjCaCXU</a>Interesting that the British government is packet sniffing at airports. Imo they should pay the $90k to the Spanish government.

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jareklupinski超过 1 年前

assuming TLS isn't broken and E2E is working as intended...isn't it more likely that someone saw the message while looking over their shoulder, was reasonably worried and alerted a security officer: "hey someone over there is messaging about harming the plane", and then things got muddled from there about technology?even going past a ceiling camera pointing down straight at you writing a message would probably give enough resolution to see an emoji.... but it's not like airport security wants to reveal their abilities

mellosouls超过 1 年前

The headline here is very misleading and different from the article - has the article changed or been editorialised here?"On my way to blow up the plane (I'm a member of the Taliban)."British man, but - going by the name - presumably of Indian (?) heritage.The article doesn't give his actual background (which seems like craven reporting), but crap joke or not you don't get to make those comments as a young British Asian male in a "private" group chat (neither are the number of individuals in the group described) in that context and not expect there to be repercussions.I'm suspicious also of the idea this was intercepted by gchq, it's quite believable that's a cover for somebody in the group being (rightfully) worried and doing their civic duty.Perhaps it's an overreaction and security overreach but there's more complexity than indicated in the simplistic headline here.

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robbiewxyz超过 1 年前

Snap explicitly claims to "work to proactively escalate any content that could involve imminent threats to life" [1]. Given this, it seems almost certain that the Wi-Fi explanation is miscommunication, misunderstanding, or misdirection.On a broader note, two days in jail, two years in courts, and possibly over $100k in fines will make a mess out of a college kid's life. All that for a common joke is downright negligence on the part of the authorities simply because of the high risk of instilling a resentment toward society in the accused. Ugh.[1] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230606001918/https://values.snap.com/privacy/transparency/legal-requests" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20230606001918/https://values.sn...</a>

gravitypool超过 1 年前

For those who have said that text messages aren't encrypted, I'm pretty sure this is inaccurate. You can almost guarantee the big social media platforms used TLS encryption on all their data in transit. A quick and dirty packet capture confirmed this, no messages can be seen in plain text. Also, a quick test sending messages from an iPhone with the latest iOS through Burpsuite will cause the app to not work properly. Messages aren't sent or received, and we can see the logs in SSL fatal errors "certificate_unknown". This is even after the cert was installed as a Trusted Root CA. This seems to be evident of SSL pinning, also as expected. There are many variables here, way too many to account for, but I would probably rule out the "This was captured on Airport wifi". With this and the information from the other messages here, I'm personally going to lean towards it was an internal Snapchat flag that alerted law enforcement, or GCHQ has a Snowdenesque backdoor.

g-b-r超过 1 年前

It's incredible that even on Hacker News so many people expect that Snapchat messages are not monitoredI guess that explains why it's so used.It's a centralized, non E2EE system, you don't expect them to flag something with "blow up", "plane" and "taliban" in the same message?It's more likely than one of the group members reported it, but if it got flagged, sent to some five eyes system and there they noticed (manually or automatically) that the guy just boarded a plane, it doesn't sound surprising !And actually Snapchat gets the users' position as well, it might well be that a reviewer at Snapchat itself saw that he was in an airport and reported it.Being an immediate threat it's not surprising they acted like that.The weird wifi story means that they know people expect privacy on Snapchat, I guess.

timmb超过 1 年前

I’m guessing this wouldn’t have had the same response if the guy was white. Feels like the guy should be due compensation by the Spanish government. Is there really a law that prohibits private jokes that may alarm an unknown surveillance system?

unsupp0rted超过 1 年前

> A court in Madrid heard it was assumed the message triggered alarm bells after being picked up via Gatwick's Wi-Fi network.Sent a message to the friend he's traveling with openly over the airport's public wifi = public nuisance?

Dig1t超过 1 年前

>Mr Verma's message was picked up by the UK security services who flagged it to Spanish authorities while the easyJet plane was still in the air.It sounds like the UK government is spying on citizens’ private messages to each other. The article says it was sent only to people he was traveling with on the day of his flight.This strikes me as extremely authoritarian and scary.Europeans: why are there not mass protests about this? Is this the kind of world that you actually want to live in? Is it just apathy? Or is this seen as a good thing?

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penguin_booze超过 1 年前

> Shortly after, the court was told two Spanish F-18 fighter jets were sent to flank the aircraft.Genuine question: what's the point of scrambling fighter jets to escort a passenger one? Is the intent to shoot the plane down, if it comes to that? But if the bomb were to go off, what are the fighter jets supposed to do? Won't they, too, get damaged in the blast?

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vlod超过 1 年前

Time to seriously use Signal for everything (I've not heard it's been broken).

LordShredda超过 1 年前

This is quite dumb, if he was actually going to do it he wouldn't announce it so clearly on a non-encrypted channel. Does the UK really think state supported agents talk on snapchat?

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simmerup超过 1 年前

Wonder how many of the people here complaining about text messages actually read the article and know it was a snapchat.He probably got dobbed in by someone for such a shit joke

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ijhuygft776超过 1 年前

I sometime make bomb jokes in private messages to throw off mass spying... everyone should do that.

vdaea超过 1 年前

It doesn't explain how the authorities got ahold of that message, since it was sent in private allegedly.Also the entire process is happening in Spain and he has British citizenship - can't he just ignore the courts?

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wonderwonder超过 1 年前

Reminds me of this: <a href="https://news.met.police.uk/news/former-met-officers-sentenced-for-sending-offensive-whatsapp-messages-476538#:~:text=Six%20former%20Metropolitan%20Police%20officers,the%20Met's%20professional%20standards%20team" rel="nofollow">https://news.met.police.uk/news/former-met-officers-sentence...</a>.Europe is determined to control your thoughts and punish you for wrong think