Court documents from a recent gun-trafficking case in New York has revealed a tool by the FBI which can read your encrypted private messages on the Signal messenger application.
The court documents, filed by the Justice Department and obtained by Forbes, showed screenshots of Signal messages between men allegedly discussing an illegal weapons trade and attempted murder.
The screenshots reportedly showed metadata indicating that Signal had been decrypted on their phone when the device was in a certain state called “partial AFU,” which stands for “after first unlock.”
In this state, iPhones are more vulnerable to having their data extracted.
For law enforcement to access private Signal messages from an iPhone, it usually must be in AFU mode.
Still, a phone’s vulnerability will depend heavily on how up to date it is.
Still, it remains unclear what tools the FBI would use to bypass encryption. Two of the most prominent iPhone forensics tools used by the agency are GrayKey and Cellebrite.
Vladimir Katalov, founder of the Russian forensics company ElcomSoft, told Forbes he believes GrayKey was the tool that the FBI used in the gun-trafficking case.
“It uses some very advanced approach using hardware vulnerabilities,” Katalov said.
As GreatGameIndia reported earlier, it was the CIA that created the Signal app, funded by the US government to protect communications of its agents deployed for regime change.
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One Response
So, accessing an American Citizen’s private conversation without serving them a warrant FIRST is not a violation of 4th Amendment?!!! Even Cornell Law School knows this is UNLAWFUL as it VIOLATES THE U.S. CONSTITUTION. FBI deep state asshole Nazi fascists.