Originally published at: Corrupt police analyst jailed
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I think the coolness of using the secret decoder ring app may have trumped the common sense of we’re less likely to get caught if we don’t discuss crimes on broadcasting/recording devices.
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It seems like borderline entrapment, but I don’t know what the UK laws on entrapment are. But in the US, since she only warned her friend after the police planted bogus evidence that implicated her friend, I think there’s an argument for entrapment. A weak argument, but an argument. In layman’s terms, entrapment occurs when the police do something to induce you to commit a crime you would not have otherwise committed if it were not for whatever action the police took. I could be wrong, though. I am no expert in Criminal Law, because it sucks and heavily favors the state.
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I know for a fact that plenty of criminals either have people placed, or have suborned people, in the civilian support staff of the police. She’s foolish or unlucky enough to get caught. There’s folks still there with better opsec.
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According to the article in the Register, they put her under surveillance and fed her fake intelligence after seeing EncroChat messages mentioning her. IANAL but I imagine that talking to criminals about police operations and capabilities counts as misconduct.
Personally, I think the cops’ mass surveillance should be more illegal than her telling people about it. My gripe is that she just told friends rather than publicly revealing the surveillance.
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That article doesn’t actually say that the earlier messages mentioned Mottram by name. It just says that there were messages to Kay (Mottram’s friend) warning Kay that the police had infiltrated the app. Then it says the police suspected those messages were sent by Mottram, but it doesn’t say why they suspected Mottram. That’s when they started the surveillance and fabricated the evidence for Mottram to analyze that got her caught when she then alerted Kay. Again, I’m saying that, in the US, there might be an argument that this is entrapment. I do not know about UK law. And I also said it was a weak argument. A lot would depend on what led them to suspect Mottram in the first place, which isn’t revealed in the article.
My other problem with this entire story is also mentioned in the Register article, and that’s the legality of the infiltration into the app to begin with. In the US, this would absolutely require a warrant, or cooperation from the company that makes the app. I have a real problem with the authorities here just infiltrating this app without some kind of warrant. The ends should not justify the means here. It will be interesting to see where the lawsuits go.
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It sounds like the fake intel was used to confirm their suspicions about who the source was, so as long as they only charged her for the initial leak instead of the later tip-off then “entrapment” wouldn’t apply since she did that all on her own.
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yeah, and in theory i think us police can’t get warrants for generalized criminality. they have to get warrants for specific individuals.
i think in practice they will sometimes use parallel discovery , so they dragnet surreptitiously and then use that information to find evidence to justify a warrant. but that’s only a problem when they get caught doing it i guess 
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Along with the discussions about warrants and entrapment and how much privacy is reasonable in civil society, this is the bit that jumps out at me. Not a face-to-face spoken message, nor a burn-after-reading paper message, but a digitally transmitted message warning of … ewps. I understand and expect that the messages might’ve been over another app, but man. There’s a cautionary tale for anyone with anything they’d like to keep hidden.
As @snigs said above
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