It certainly looks like it, but does this mean all BES setups are compromised? I believe numerous leaders of countries use BES so that could be interesting then.
Looking at the Canadian court document and the press release of the Dutch public prosecutor, it is almost suspicious that zero information is given how the police got the info needed to convince Canadian court to hand over the data.
Another interesting fact is that the data was already handed over on the 19th of September, why make it public now?
The difference is that getting unlimited physical access to government BES installations is going to be far more difficult. (we have to assume whatever they used requires this, as they physically confiscated the data) It's also possible that BB is working in concert with the Dutch and want to keep mum.
public six months later, maybe things cooled down enough and this is just SOP for holland. It's also possible that they have the case completely nailed down now and this is just part of the disclosure proceedings.
I don't claim to know enough about dutch law to tell you with any certainty.
thoughts?
(this is on our placeholder site, I don't want to publish anything too alarmist or inaccurate)
Agreed. Talking about physical access, I wonder why Ennetcom would use servers in Canada instead of here in the Netherlands. A Dutch judge would never granted access to the server so easily. Or are the servers part of the BES and did Ennetcom have no say where they would be located?
Me neither, but with the Dutch elections coming up on March the 15th, everything is suspicious. I guess its time for me to get some tinfoil.
Interesting article which covers the story very nice I think. Only thing what is a little inaccurate is "The Blackberries were purchased by the criminal organization". It's not one organization they are after. Basically every serious criminal and criminal organization used them according to the police.
Also interesting: the Canadian court has put limitations on the use of the data
"[24] In summary, the appropriate way, in my view, to protect the rights of third persons in this situation is to include, in the sending order, terms and conditions that:
(i) require that the Kingdom of the Netherlands restrict access to the data to the Dutch investigators involved in the four investigations that formed the basis for the search warrant, and such other Dutch investigators who can satisfy a court in the Netherlands that they should have the right to also access that data, and;
(ii) require that the Kingdom of the Netherlands prohibit access to the data by any persons, including investigators, from any other country."
So on the one hand we have the Dutch prosecutor stating they have obtained evidence for over a dozen criminal investigations already. On the other hand we have the Canadian judge who said the data should only be used for four specific investigations, and in order to use the data in any other investigations they should first convince the court.
If the Dutch authorities really bring all those investigations to court, they might not be making friends with the Canadians.
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You might say it'll clog the diplomatic pipes if they don't keep their tulips sealed, causing a windmill of chaotic relations, leading to Canada putting the red lights up on discourse, that protective dikes will no doubt debate on Tumblr once the weeds and psychedelic truffles of divisiveness start to spread.
(I had to, I've been holding it in since the tread started)
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Badum tsssss. (ok, you made me smile)
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did I miss any of the key stereotypes? I try to keep up to date on the pulse of international ignorance
Hookers. Hookers everywhere you look. Other than that you nailed it.
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how could I have forgotten? edited for accuracy and posterity.
I will let it slide this time. Too busy eating cheese anyway
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So basically the tl:dr version is that there was a criminal organization that was targeted, they used those blackberries, authorities then got a court order to raid ennetcomms servers, but were authorized to only 'crack' 4 users' data.
Symantec was the company behind the PGPs and most likely those certs were backdoored lol.
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can you provide citation for the symantec connection (preferably in english? or with rough translation for my bilingual pleb brain)
No one said it's backdoored tho, I said 'most likely' because what's more likely?
A) Dutch forensic agencies broke encryption
B) A proprietary encryption algorithm developed in an orwellian nation is backdoored.
Trick question, it was:
C) SEP lets you access keystores if you have physical access to the server
You can use a variety of algos with all the modern, OSS implementations of PGP. (At least in GPG)
I'm not disagreeing with you about the possibility of a back door, I just doubt that it'd be utlilized for the first time under public scrutiny because the Dutch can't keep their house clean. Just curious as to your though process
Oh well, in this case, the main message, being the statement of the lawyer of ennetcom, was inserted as an update to the tweakers story more than 5 hours later. I agree that nu.nl is not usually a statement to the best journalism, but in this particular case, they got it sooner and right to the point than the "tech press".
Seen from Germany, with all of the criminals "working the border" from Holland, and the fact that the origin of the very large majority of a certain class of ever more annoying criminal gangs of immigrational descent always seems to be in Holland, including the notorious jihadi imams that pop up in Belgium (the Verviers cell, held responsible for several terrorits plots) and in Germany (the Düsseldorf and Hildenheim cells, same story). If we go shopping to Maastricht, it used to be a family excursion in a really nice and clean and friendly littel city, now you pretty much need an armoured escort to make your way through the junkies and zombies littering the thoroughly diirty, partially dilapidated and unfriendly city full of scared people who literally throw you out of their shop so they can get home outside the city before dark. And if you drive to Maastricht with your family to go shopping, you get stalked and harrassed by the Dutch police as if they haven't got anything better to do. That is first hand experience, nothing to do with politics, which I am not discussing.
The thing with the Blackberry Messenger service is that the messages are deleted and overwritten after 48 hours. So just confiscating the servers would only bring 48 hours worth of messages, not 3.6 million messages. So the sad reality is that the police and prosecution and probably the marechaussee or the secret service, had been intercepting these messages long before they even applied for an inquisitorial instruction based on money laundry. They just helped themselves with any legal ground, completely raping the democratic principles of justice, and then started building a retro-active justification charade. It's the sad evolution that is typical for such circumstances.
In Germany, there was a period called the "German Winter", basically the period from the Rote Armee Faktion to the Chaos Computer Club, where the German authorities and police would employ similar methods. The unsentenced suspects of the Rote Armee Faktion would be isolated, would be visited by CIA operatives, and would end up "committing suicide" in prison, the founder of the Chaos Computer Club would first commit suicide in his car, then being dead, step out of his car, ingnite his car with gasoline from the outside, then hurry back into his car to burn. It is not good to allow this kind of evolution, even though it is the wet dream of ultra-right morons and their populist agenda. Such institutionalised illegality is always a reaction to a period in which people have lost their minds over nonsense. In Germany, after WWII, they were so afraid of setting any rules at all, that the German military was allowed to have long hair, because they couldn't be hampered in their freedom of expression, and they had to wear hairnets for their safety. In the same period, Germany, especially West-Berlin, became the world's pornography and deviant sex industry capital, the streets were littered with junkies, etc... sound familiar? People have a really hard time focussing on the important stuff when it comes to freedom. Especially people with a Calvinist-influenced background like the Netherlands and Germany, people who always blame themselves for the failure of others and thus create a climate where people who do point fingers, can easily come to power.
And just to complete the picture, that disarray is still not gone in Germany, and it will probably never really disappear, even 30 years after the reunification. Frankfurt is the financial center of Europe right, you would expect a very nice city. Well it's like London, the Financial City and the boutiques are very nice, but then you drive to the airport, like in London you take the train to London City Airport in the Docks, and you ride past all of those dilapidated large buildings where people live in questionnable circumstances... Frankfurt has exactly that. Frankfurt also happens to harbour the world's largest cyber warfare unit operated by the CIA and NSA, and a lot of the cyber weapons the US uses against the rest of the world are developed there, because they are illegal to be developed on US soil. Same in Bavaria and Northern Germany with the US attack drones. Or Bonn, the former capital of Germany, now a Saudi enclave with the German CIA headquarters in the middle of it, another very sad story of total decay. Lawlessness by authorities creates a climate in which lawlessness becomes a standard for society. "If you can't beat them, join them" is the most evil of all principles.
Also check the statement from the lawyer or Ennetcom:
They also state all servers would be wiped after 48 hours, but I have a hard time believing that.
You are right, but just be careful using nu.nl. they basically copy/paste from the ANP press agency. The facts are often there, but the lack of any real editorial office sometimes shows.
We most definitely have our problems, but blaming drugs is not correct in my opinion.
Maastricht and the rest of the south of limburg is a lost cause and should be contained in a cordon sanitaire immediately. Ok now seriously. I live north of Eindhoven, but went to school in Sittard and Maastricht and I definitely agree with your view of the City. But the south of Limburg has always been "special needs" and nobody likes them. The "normal" people from there are massively migrating out of Limburg, and only the numerous junkies and drugs runners are left. If you only have been to Maastricht, you have a very wrong picture of rest of The Netherlands. (btw, I am really making friends on this forum: satudarah, the whole of south limburg, who's next?)
It seems to look like it more and more. It would not surprise me if the AIVD has been intercepting and storing messages for the police, but on the other hand it would not surprise me the servers were not properly wiped. We will probably never know the truth.
You must be fun at parties! No but I agree there are problems, but I think we disagree on the cause and the solution. Although this:
is spot on.
Especially the lack of balls with our prime minister and the rest of his faulty cabinet contributed to this. Can't wait for the 15th.
Nothing is ever black or white, I'm a rather positive person overall, just think that the shadows are as interesting as the highlights. It's like when you find that antique Chesterfield chair that you've been looking for, and it smells of leather, it almost always also smells of tobacco, or that new electronics smell, it smells of technological innovation AND deadly chemicals.
Life is like perfume, when you first smell it, it smells of fragrance and deadly denatured alcohol, but after a while, the alcohol evaporates and the fragrance becomes more interesting as it blends with your own skin. All you have to do to experience that, is basically to keep breathing...
Yeah elections next week are going to be interesting.
But yeah there has been a new law recentlly that gives digital police investigators,
more ability to gather digital information on suspects.
So yeah they could have seen this comming.
The big questions still remains, if they have only targeted and analysed the data on the suspects.
Or did they analyse everything?
Q: How much of this paraphanelia is back on the streets?