Dutch police cracks encrypted chat service

Peter King said:

Many crimes were found and evidence collected when the Dutch police found and encrypted a special chat service for criminals only. XTC labs, weapons, drugs (hard and soft). The police was able to watch and collect 265,000 chat messages from criminals.

More than 100 suspects have been identified and several people are already arrested.

The police had to end the sting operation when they found that due to arrests and impounding of drugs/etc., several members of the criminal chat group were under the impression that there was a traitor among them and were planning to eliminate those supposed traitors. This would have led to a crime war so the police wrote those people (shortly before they were arrested) that nobody snitched on them but that they, the police were watching their criminal chat network.

I think this is a wonderful result and I hope that many criminals will find themselves behind bars.

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longview said:

I think it would have been more valuable to keep the fact that they had broken the encryption to themselves,
and continue to gather information.

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Tom Horn said:

Encryption can only work if the keys are changed more than periodically. Without the capture of their enigma keys and machine, the allies would’ve lost their convoy battles.

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longview said:

I think it would have been more valuable to keep the fact that they had broken the encryption to themselves,
and continue to gather information.

Click to expand...

Tom Horn said:

Encryption can only work if the keys are changed more than periodically. Without the capture of their enigma keys and machine, the allies would’ve lost their convoy battles.

Click to expand...

Peter King said:

Many crimes were found and evidence collected when the Dutch police found and encrypted a special chat service for criminals only. XTC labs, weapons, drugs (hard and soft). The police was able to watch and collect 265,000 chat messages from criminals.

More than 100 suspects have been identified and several people are already arrested.

The police had to end the sting operation when they found that due to arrests and impounding of drugs/etc., several members of the criminal chat group were under the impression that there was a traitor among them and were planning to eliminate those supposed traitors. This would have led to a crime war so the police wrote those people (shortly before they were arrested) that nobody snitched on them but that they, the police were watching their criminal chat network.

I think this is a wonderful result and I hope that many criminals will find themselves behind bars.

Click to expand...

Tom Horn said:

Encryption can only work if the keys are changed more than periodically. Without the capture of their enigma keys and machine, the allies would’ve lost their convoy battles.

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Peter King said:

They had already arrested the man and his business partner who were running the encrypted service. So in theory they could have just changed the enigma keys from time to time.

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Bodhisattva said:

Nah... anti-submarine warfare was getting much better and longer range air patrols were spotting U-Boats... they were gonna lose no matter what, it just might have taken a bit longer.

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Bodhisattva said:

They should have let the scum eliminate each other...

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Peter King said:

As stated, some criminals thought other criminals were betraying them and they were planning to murder the suspected traitors, a gang/crime war was being threatened on that encrypted chat service and if the police would have allowed murders even though they knew it was coming, it would not have been acceptable.

So they let it known that it was them who had the access to the chat service and it was not due to betrayal that deals had gone wrong and people were arrested.

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longview said:

That would be a tough decision, I think people who show no regard for the laws that allow our society to exist,
have no right to participate in it. When we send someone to prison, we are as much excluding them from society,
as we are punishing them for their criminal activity.
Perhaps an alternative path would have been to arrest the targets, and protect the knowledge of the broken encryption.

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Peter King said:

You do know that gangsters usually do not do the killing themselves? For that there are a whole host of Eastern block countrymen/Moroccan or other foreigners who love to do those things for some cash.

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