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Dutch Police Seize Encrypted Communication Network With 19,000 Users (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Dutch police have seized and shut down Ennetcom, an encrypted communications network with 19,000 users, according to Reuters. The network's 36-year-old owner, Danny Manupassa, has also been arrested, and faces charges of money laundering and illegal weapons possession, while the information obtained in the seizure may also be used for other criminal prosecutions. "Police and prosecutors believe that they have captured the largest encrypted network used by organized crime in the Netherlands," prosecutors said in a statement.
"Although using encrypted communications is legal," Reuters reports, "many of the network's users are believed to have been engaged in 'serious criminal activity,' said spokesman Wim de Bruin of the national prosecutor's office, which noted that the company's modified phones have repeatedly turned up in cases involving drugs, criminal motorcycle gangs, and gangland killings.
A spokesman for the National Prosecutor's office "declined to comment on whether and how police would be able to decrypt information kept on the servers."
"Although using encrypted communications is legal," Reuters reports, "many of the network's users are believed to have been engaged in 'serious criminal activity,' said spokesman Wim de Bruin of the national prosecutor's office, which noted that the company's modified phones have repeatedly turned up in cases involving drugs, criminal motorcycle gangs, and gangland killings.
A spokesman for the National Prosecutor's office "declined to comment on whether and how police would be able to decrypt information kept on the servers."
Holland != Canada.
Or was it done at the behest of the British ???
That's just a hilarious thought.
E
...You don't need any encryption.
"We must be able to monitor everybody. Let's nuke this communication system. Tell the sheeple something about organized crime. That will suffice".
Does this mean the NoSuchAgency have backdoors into all other systems? Of course if your secret keys reside on some server, then they're not really secret, just ask BlackBerry
Please meet a girl. You do not spot explicit irony any more. Meet her very physically.
"Hells Angels smuggle cocaine into the country through terrorist organizations"
Is there anything that we won't declare a Terrorist Organization? And no, I'm not an anti-gov't guy. Hell, I'm a bleedin' socialist and voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary (waited in line 2 1/2 hours to do that, too).
As for the weapons, to be honest in America that's not really a big deal. I don't mean that as a joke either. I know gun nuts who've got that kinda spread. Gernande launchers are legal here. It's the munitions we regulate. Different gun culture though.
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Good job by the authorities. Who knows what those crackpot criminals were planning to do???
What, no award? Seriously:
Shouldn't he get an award for providing the police with a concentrated treasure trove of information about illegal activity they otherwise wouldn't have such easy access to?
I wonder if they will sell it at the police auction.
AT&T switches seized because known criminals were using it to communicate with one another. Also, all Postal Service trucks will be ordered off the roads as criminals are using them to mail illegal goods.
there fixed it for you..
How do you define an "encrypted network" modern security and the majority of web based applications rely on encryption so isn't seizing a "encrypted network" the same as seizing a network?
"We must be able to monitor everybody. Let's nuke this communication system. Tell the sheeple something about organized crime. That will suffice".
There are words the geek needs to erase from his vocabulary because they do not play well to those outside his own community. Sheep (in all its variations as posted to Slashdot) is one of them.
Accurate summary: "The cops siezed a network and other assets used by alleged criminals to facilitate crime. Oh and by the way it used encryption though despite that the cops we able to get what they needed to legally justify intervening without breaking the encyption."
Instead that scary "encryption" is right up front, though it was irrelevant. They might as well have said "computers" or "electrons"
Banks like CitiGroup have similar private setups but no one will ever question them. There are no policemen patrolling the corridors or corporations no matter how corrupt they are.
The whole point of this article is to associate using encryption with criminal activities. I bet the suspects under arrest also drank coffee and drove cars. Can we safely say that terrorists and criminals drink coffee and drive cars? We should treat anyone who drinks coffee and drives as suspects.
Also note that they were arrested despite using encryption, drinking coffee, and driving cars.
Funny how the headline is "Dutch Police Seize Encrypted Communication Network" while actually it is about a (1) guy arrested for money laundering and illegal weapons possession. It has absolutely shit to do with encryption.
Another depressingly obvious attempt at blackening encryption in the minds of the people, the obvious goal of course being more control by corporations / the government over the people.
This "war on encryption" is stupid to the core.
When I want to message my colleagues, mostly ISIS members but also some Taliban, I use paper, pens, and send the missives to my minions via the United State Postal Service.
Encryption, pfeh! There is nothing that can feasibly beat OTPs (one-time pads). And the USPS is Constitutionally mandated by the US Government to exist.
Maybe the government should surveil itself!
PS — WARNING to NSA, FBI, and other idiots: Sarcasm is above.
I'm interested to know whether the law used was a generic law, such as facilitating a criminal act, or something more specific. Does anyone (Dutch) know whether there is a criminal article for facitating a heavy criminal act? If so, Which artikel number is it in the "wetboek van strafrecht".
The reason I ask is because where I live (in the netherlands) the council were actually helping facilitating stalking, which is a heacy criminal activity with up to 3 years jail sentence (There refused to enforce reversal of a window illegally built and then used to stalk the neighbor through for more than 5 years) and they even kept this fact secret and are blocking the freedom of information act used to get further (non verbal) evidence of this. Eventually, instead of forcing this guy to reverse the window they bought his house. The police, council and justice department all worked together in agreement to secretly not enforce the reversal of this windows. That would make the authorities guilty of facilitating a heavy criminal act (The justice department already have agreed to prosecute this guy for 9 years stalking but kept facilitating this crime).
Just good enough. A new set of encryption algorithms with a minimum 1 to 10^89 'coordinate' mapping,
key requirement of a minimum of 64 alphanumeric charcters, no more than a 1 to 16 expansion factor
and exposure of the algorithm does not provide any clues for decryption without the key....
Just good enough would be a brue-force time of > 10 years without the key.
Better would be > 1000 years and a guaranteed mathematical paradox for a quantum computer.
In Australia, international mail is intercepted and destroyed, often as biased just because it has a Nigerian stamp.
So if denting Nigerian scams is legal, who says they are not inspecting the mailbag going to Middle East?
Too bad the senders addresses are elected members (congress-critters) all interested in joining Bin Drinkin University. Nothing like creating misunderstandings
"which noted that the company's modified phones have repeatedly turned up in cases involving drugs, criminal motorcycle gangs, and gangland killings."
Just like Glocks and Smith&Wessons, we should close those firms and throw everybody in jail.
Now, that sounds like someone doing some moderately deep hacking into the OS of the phones.
On the other hand, I'm also reminded of the warnings that went out with the initial releases of PGP about "snake oil", and the bad habit of general computing programmers to believe that they've invented a foolproof method of encryption which in reality is a pile of dreck.
My guess - the police were watching this system carefully, and at some point the operator put out an update with a flaw in either his encryption or his key-handling. Then once they knew they could recover significant amounts of data from the system, then they shut it down. Which would tell us more about the (accused, not convicted) "Danny Manupassa" and his abilities at encryption or key-handling programming, not the main stream of encryption engineering.
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Most criminals are found to wear clothing of some sort or another.
In Australia, international mail is intercepted and destroyed, often as biased just because it has a Nigerian stamp.
So if denting Nigerian scams is legal, who says they are not inspecting the mailbag going to Middle East?
Too bad the senders addresses are elected members (congress-critters) all interested in joining Bin Drinkin University. Nothing like creating misunderstandings
I have had my ideas, conceived and proposed by me, STOLEN from me by staff of the various three-letter US Agencies, who are bound BY LAW to keep such things secret.
Instead, they proposed my ideas as their own. They got promotions. The ideas become "Program Secret" –way more exclusive than "Top Secret". That means jail time for talking about them, even if you had no knowledge of this misappropriation of YOUR concepts and self-identified critical needs of the US DOD. That is, you are hushed, but without ever being warned about such. I have no idea of the ITAR or not-ITAR classification of the ideas that I myself generated, developed, and presented with the expectation of funding for such work — That is the job of Program Managers –to pay people with good ideas to make them reality.
Sputnik showed the USSR to be way ahead of the USA. China's moon-base will do the same. Hey guys, do you need any help?
I am looking right at you Paul Eremenko of DARPA, who stole my proposed ideas on [REDATCED-1]. You violated Federal Law by usurping credit for the ideas that I proposed to you, knowing, myself, at the time, that you were bound by law to keep such ideas secret, and to fund and promote those who supplied the 'great ideas'.
I am also looking directly at you, Dr. Daniel Green of DARPA, who also stole another set of my ideas, despite being, at the time, at ARO or NRO, and being bound by Government Secrecy Laws to NOT disclose what any private individual shared with you. ALL Program Managers are bound by this legal requirement, but you instead chose to thieve someone's good ideas – a person who trusted in their own government for protection from bandits such as yourself. The concept I shared concerned [REDACTED-2]. You stole credit for it, you asshole.
For those not in the know, "REDACTED-1" indicates self-organizing swarms of tiny satellites. By using GPS, and good time-keeping, they can determine their relative positions dynamically, resulting in an incredibly large 'synthetic aperture' for extra-terrestrial observation, or of anything on the ground (with ultra-high resolution, while remaininginvisible to most terrestrial space-facing radar systems. Known locations = known phase differences of received signals. Do the math.
For Daniel Green, a long-time fan of heterogeneous integration, but without any ideas ever coming out of his own mind — Dan used my ideas, concepts, and material to gain himself a position as a DARPA Program Manager. Was there ever a little thank-you, or even any response to my many emails to Dr. Daniel Green over the years? Nope. None. A small "thank you" of funding might have sufficed, you fuck-head.
Both of these fuckers have multi-million dollar (annual budgets) – actually $10M's – for Program Ideas that they stole from me, in contravention to US Law for the Government Employees they were at the times of IP theft. The electronic-communications trail is very long, making it impossible to ignore.
What is it I am asking? Do I still want to be a DARPA Program Manager? NO. No fucking way. I will go through the interview process another time, only to have my best ideas harvested by the thieves at DARPA. At my first interview with DARPA, one PM told me (at lunch), "We steal ideas." Boy howdy, do they ever!
Dear China and Russia, I am open for business. My only requirement is that I be paid up-front. (The US Government has 'intellectually raped' me enough times that I do no