The whole story seems a bit fishy. It’s probably true in some loose sense, but overall it feels like the details have been heavily curated to appeal to the segment of the British public that gobbles up those Jed Mercurio TV shows.
It doesn’t seem far-fetched that they could get fingerprints from a photo, what with all the pixels floating around these days. The part that really demands more explanation is this “encrochat” app, which has only 100k users and is “used exclusively by criminals”(!) despite apparently lacking the cop-proof security of WhatsApp, Signal or iMessage. Also, “encro”?
If I were a drug dealer, I probably wouldn’t be doing it on social media, let alone on an app I’d never heard of whose app store entry reads “Greetings, fellow criminals! Communicate with other persons of interest using secret ‘crypt-o’ codes those bastard hero cops can’t crack! Handy drug deal calculator lets you record crimes in a manner admissible in court pursuant to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984!”
It was a cellphone service in europe that supplied modified phones, encryption apps, and chat services that literally marketed to the criminal underworld. It was much like what the cartels were doing in Mexico when they literally made their own cellular communications network. It was believed to be a conglomeration of multiple organized crime syndicates into a telecom company that used SIMs from dutch provider KPN
So these people have the wherewithal to build an encrypted telecom network and all they can think of using it for is crime. Why not get it to folks who really need one, like the activists in Hong Kong?
