Happy to see a privacy-focused carrier, and it has better policies than any other carrier out there. But founder is formerly from Palantir and there’s a lot of VC money behind it (not inherently a problem, just flagging).
Thoughts?
Palantir, end of discussion.
100% honeypot
Big encrochat vibes
What makes you think encrochat was a honeypot? Am I missing something?
Because they literally operated it as a honeypot and gave police full access to chats while advertising to criminals that it was safe.
EncroChat first came to the attention of the media when it was revealed that high-profile criminals Mark Fellows and Steven Boyle had been using the encrypted devices to communicate during the May 2018 gangland murder of John Kinsella in Rainhill, England.[16][9][17] The service resurfaced in the media during the summer of 2020 after law enforcement agencies announced that they had infiltrated the encrypted network and investigative journalist Joseph Cox, who had been reviewing EncroChat for months, published an exposé in Vice Motherboard
Where did you read that they gave police full access? I thought they were hacked.
That’s even worse then because they didn’t even have a secure network from start. Be it willful ignorance or intentional assistance, its still a honeypot. This was a huge “I told you so” by a lot of the dark net community when it happened, a lot of people called it WAY ahead of time.
Encrochat isn’t the only example, so i may have conflated it with one of these other Honeypot operations: ANOM, Phantom Secure , Ghost , SkyECC
You might be able to see a pattern here. People who actually want security and anonymity know that you can’t trust those things over to a corporation or a bunch of tech broligarchs, they will either betray you intentionally or due to their incompetence.
https://cyberscoop.com/cape-phone-privacy-calea-tracking/
Good article which points to a few promising aspects. They seem to have their own phones (as of Nov 24) as part of this. Second, that their market is “high risk” individuals. So people with money, it sounds like. If the pricing reflects a market for governments, celebs, and crypto bros trying to not get SIM swap attacked, then it’s not likely a honeypot for Feds. Maybe.
I hate the idea of only being allowed to use their phones, but that might just be their “easy mode” for idiot celebrities or government contracts. If they can give me a physical SIM, I’m interested.
I would not be an early adopter. Hang and see who isn’t a plant that joins.
The feds have already pulled a similar stunt with another manufacturer+software combo. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield#Distribution_and_usage)
The only thing that makes this smell legit is the fact that it is a provider and probably only eSIMs. But even then, this is not very good opsec to be deliberately using a marketed product that will likely have an identifier for their cell traffic. Graphene works as well as it does because it runs of pre-existing hardware to be more inconspicuous.
they contracted with the AFP to run the first node of the server and process the data. (Australian law does not provide the same protections as U.S. law for its citizens.)
Thanks for that link. I didn’t know that. We are below the US in privacy laws! Is there any first world country worst than Australia?
They said all users were criminals, but who knows what they are calling a crime, specially with the retarded laws down here…
It shows what I suspected, that Australian software and servers must be avoided even more than Americans.
