British man Aditya Verma appears in Spanish court over plane-bomb hoax
Aditya Verma sent a Snapchat message in July 2022 saying he was about to "blow up" a plane.
TL;DR
Don't use snapchat
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he wrote "On my way to blow up the plane (I'm a member of the Taliban)." in a private group chat on snap chat
...a private group chat. Nothing stupid like posting it on xitter or other public place.
Its a fucking in-joke. Do I need to worry about what I say to my friends now in private and worry about what my friendly local government spy would think about it... ?
All this invasion of privacy all these years and all they have to show for it are a few false positives.
Honestly I hope that this trial is swift and that the government ends up paying him for lost time and money.
On the other hand this is a really good reason to use encrypted communications
He was acquitted, thankfully.
And then you see the recent news about some presumably terrorists having "tails" and "signal" as evidence in their case
The spying is not what suprises me, it's the prosecution. I see why the term matched, I just don't see why it would be illegal.
In general I agree, but there's no privacy on airport Wi-Fi. And very little at an airport in general.
Shouldn't it be all encrypted with SSL?
All the airport wifi could do is see the DNS requests (and the modern trend is to have DoH or DoT enabled by default, for example in the up to date versions of Android)
Probably more likely to be surveillance of Snapchat.
From the article:
A court in Madrid heard it was assumed the message triggered alarm bells after being picked up via Gatwick's Wi-Fi network.
Public wifi without a VPN is like sex without a condom. The connection may not be encrypted (very risky) and even if it is, you are still susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks: https://www.garlandtechnology.com/blog/how-to-monitor-encrypted-traffic-and-keep-your-network-secure
I guarantee there will be a flood of articles about this over the next few days because of what I quoted above.
It's also possible that one of his "friends" reported him or something like that.
Please explain to me how using Public WiFi is unsafe if the traffic is encrypted with TLS. Unless they somehow installed a keylogger on everyone connected to said Wifi and picked it up from there, the only way this was possible was on some quick text analysis and recognising the IP address from Snapchat
The link I provided explains it. They can decrypt traffic through their own devices.
"A key question in the case was how the message got out, considering Snapchat is an encrypted app.
One theory, raised in the trial, was that it could have been intercepted via Gatwick's Wi-Fi network. But a spokesperson for the airport told BBC News that its network "does not have that capability".
In the judge's resolution, cited by the Europa Press news agency, it was said that the message, "for unknown reasons, was captured by the security mechanisms of England when the plane was flying over French airspace"."
it's probably some sort of Snapchat automatic alert detecting the words bomb or Taliban.
I wouldn't expect my data to be secure, but I wouldn't expect to be prosecuted as if I had willfully made it a public statement.
Snapchat gave the info to police. From BBC:
On its website, in a section titled "How We Work with Law Enforcement Authorities", Snapchat says one of its goals is to "maintain a safe and fun environment where Snapchatters are free to express themselves and stay in touch with their real friends".
It adds: "We also work to proactively escalate to law enforcement any content appearing to involve imminent threats to life, such as school shooting threats, bomb threats and missing persons cases, and respond to law enforcement's emergency requests for disclosure of data when law enforcement is handling a case involving an imminent threat to life.
Yes, especially in the UK, since they're a surveillance state.
There are some things that will always get flagged on any platform. This, drugs, and connections to sanctioned countries, for example. I've heard of people in the US having their Venmo accounts suspended because they put "Havana" in the transaction description. Havana is a local dance club.