He didn’t use encrypted everything. He had a public telegram group chat in which he stored a lot of his material. Which, as many people in the comments on the article pointed out, is not encrypted, but is presented by telegram as if it is. That’s likely how they caught him.
In telegram nothing is e2e encrypted unless you specifically ask it to be and when you do, it kills all the functionality that makes it better than others.
That's what I said. The person I replied to said that all messages are encrypted* with the asterisk being only if you specifically enable it. I clarified that it doesn't apply to group chats though. I don't use Telegram so the loss of functionality is actually a bigger deal to me than the argument around E2EE. Can you explain what features are lost when you enable it? It's a messaging app so I'm curious what you sacrifice for E2EE.
The secret chats feature isn’t between anyone I believe, it’s between two people. But I don’t actually know for certain because I’ve not looked into it beyond a cursory googling.
That said, you’d be correct in that just like any service out there, the moment you let random people join there’s no level of encryption that can keep your secrets secret.
If you distribute encrypted materials you also need to distribute a means of decryption. I'm willing to bet a honeypot was used to trick him into distributing his csam right to the government hinself.
True. Or it could have been a backdoor in his phone, or the full running browser in his sim card, or the backdoor into his CPU chips... Maybe they do old fashioned police work for these cases and only use the pegasus spyware for others?
Pretty silly to do anything illegal on a computer when we know how flawed they are, imo
Neither Tor nor end-to-end encrypted messengers will cover the endpoints. It's possible that they caught him using good old fashioned detective work. You don't need a software back door for that.
Tor was created by the Naval Research Labs, and was released to the public because it is secure.
The problem is that if it's only the CIA or DIA using it, it's easy figure out who is using it and where. Make it global and now there is a lot of noise to separate out.