Slashdot Mirror
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."
Sounds good.
What your slashdot password?
WHAT ARE YOU HIDING? WHAT DID YOU DO? After all, according to your first-grade simplistic thought "if you have nothing to hide" you don't need any encryption...
This is why utter morons are against encryption and the rest of us have to sigh and roll our eyes.
E
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
Actually Dutch motorcycle gangs aren't funny, or even very nice:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Hells Angels control much of the drug trade in the Netherlands, and are also involved in prostitution.[6] The Dutch police have stated that the Hells Angels smuggle cocaine into the country through terrorist organizations and drug cartels in Curaçao and Colombia, and also deal in ecstasy and illegal firearms.[175]
In October 2005, the Dutch police raided Hells Angels' clubhouses in Amsterdam, Haarlem, IJmuiden, Harlingen, Kampen and Rotterdam as well as a number of houses. Belgian police also raided two locations over the border. Police seized a grenade launcher, a flame thrower, hand grenades, 20 hand guns, a machine pistol and €70,000 (US$103,285) in cash. A number of Hells Angels members were later imprisoned on charges of international trafficking of cocaine and ecstasy, the production and distribution of marijuana, money laundering and murder, after an investigation that lasted over a year.[176]
In 2006 two Dutch newspapers reported that the Amsterdam brothel Yab Yum had long been controlled by the Dutch Hells Angels, who had taken over after a campaign of threats and blackmailing.[177] The city council of Amsterdam revoked the license of Yab Yum in December 2007. During a subsequent trial the city's attorney repeated these allegations and the brothel's attorney denied them.[178] The brothel was closed in January 2008.[179]
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
"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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I don't know but that's a lot of paddy wagons.
Good job by the authorities. Who knows what those crackpot criminals were planning to do???
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.
Well, when it comes to penis size, you could say Trump has very little to hide, maybe nothing at all. I guess I should ask his wife, but which one?
That is why it is being investigated by Canadian authorities.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
Abraham Lincoln pops into my mind. Maybe not the best response, but it was my first.
"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"
Actually Dutch motorcycle gangs aren't funny, or even very nice:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Hells Angels control much of the drug trade in the Netherlands, and are also involved in prostitution.[6]
The first statement is suspicious because the Netherlands has thousands of people involved in drugs and even more in prostitution, and it's unlikely one bike gang would be so prominent. Checking the references, that statement simply comes from a reporter for a low-circulation newspaper (which I've never heard of, and I lived there). The Hells Angles aren't as influential or powerful as the article claims.
(||) Nehmo (||)
Hells Angels is a major player in drugs and prostitution through out western Europe, they have competition yes (another bike gang, Bandidos is among them) since no once ever have 100% of a market as big as this but they are major players. Remember that we are not talking about the selling to end customers here, that is handled by the thousands of low life people that you refer to, we are talking about the smuggling and human trafficking part of it. There are not thousands of people in the Netherlands that smuggle huge amounts of cocain over the borders.
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.
Make the drugs legal and they won't be able to make money on it.
Be seeing you...
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.
People objecting to this idea usually think it would mean a complete legalization of hard drugs, free-for-all consumption and massive crime waves. I believe there *is* common ground here between the people who want to legalize several widely used drugs and the opponents of it. It's a fact, and has been for centuries, that people use certain types of drugs whether they're legal or not. Keeping such drugs illegal and their users out of the reach of professional help means it's only feeding criminal activities.
Much like we've successfully started needle exchange programs to reduce the spread of HIV and hepatitis, we could start controlled sale of several drugs. Soft drugs, such as cannabis, that have time and time again been shown to be of little harm to its users could be freely grown and used. Hard drugs could be distributed via pharmacies in a more controlled manner by health care professionals. Prices can be kept at high-enough levels not to encourage illegal sale of hard drugs, but also low enough that they don't encourage criminal activity either.
This would in the long term most likely eradicate major drug cartels and gangs that control drug trade today. The governments would be able to tax the sale of drugs and forward the money to helping drug users and other similar areas.
-SR
Hoe zou u weten?
(||) Nehmo (||)
Prostitution is legal here, although some chruistian moralists from several parties are trying to end that. Christians will never stop trying to force others to live by their dessert morals.
Taking over the red light district with treats and blackmail... That sounds alot like the actions of city council of Amsterdam after they got fooled by the lies of Valérie Lempereur. The same idiot (Asscher) who was fooled by her is now a Dutch minister.
It is not, unless you specifically aim yourself at criminals but that can hardly ever been proven (look up the company SMSCOM and see what they deliver, guess who most of their customers are, they are still in buyisiness).
But if the Dutch prosecution has nothing but still want to destroy the company they claim "money laundering", which can be used even against any local shop owner who sold anything to a criminal. Then after several years, if they can still pay the legal costs, the tax payers may pay the damages.
BTW, you could just close the curtains on your own windows.
"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.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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
Because they have played a major part in the criminal underworld where I live. During the 90:e when I was doing my Military Service there where an all out war between the Hells Angels and Bandidos, where they fired Anti Tank Weapons upon each other (the light AT4 model) so we had plenty of work in the army at the moment to protect all the weapons caches from their hands.
And it's common knowledger over here from papers to the police that HA are heavily invested in smuggling of drugs, weapons and prostitutes. Whenever a politician talks about Organized Crime here they are talking about HA.
Out of all of those charges the only one that should be illegal is the one for murder.
Just like every other religion they think that it is their god given duty to force their religion on everyone else.
Christians will never stop trying to force others to live by their dessert morals.
Is that like calling Devil's Food cake a sin or something?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?