Private communications and ilegal economies

Every day new advances make the different technologies with which we interact in our lives more attractive. Faster technology, greater performance and storage, integration of multiple functionalities in a single tool, interoperability and many more things that promise to improve the user experience.

End-to-end communication through messaging applications does not escape these logics that end up making us increasingly dependent on technology. Communities, states, groups, stickers and promises of private communications through protocols that we hardly understand, but that somehow give us a feeling of security when sharing personal matters with our interlocutors, are just an example of this.

With the increase of widespread surveillance, the offer of privacy becomes very relevant, despite the fact that there are still those who argue that they have nothing to hide. Well, those of us who choose to protect our privacy have different reasons for doing so, ranging from personal to work-related or even motivated by threat models that demand it, and the latter is precisely one of the main reasons why organized crime groups are choosing to manage their communications through applications that allow them to keep their activities secret.

Threema, Telegram, Signal and WhatsApp are some of the applications that criminals in Ecuador and the world use to communicate and coordinate their logistics and operations. So, should we think that these applications are harmful and should we avoid using them?

The answer to that question is pretty simple: No! Applications by themselves are not bad, unless they are not implemented correctly and do not actually protect their users as they claim to do. It is worth remembering the following analogy: A car can be used to commit crimes, so should we ban cars? Once again the answer is: No!

Recently one of the creators of Telegram, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France on the grounds that the application was being complicit in helping scammers, drug traffickers and people who spread child sexual abuse material. Although the application was known for the lack of moderation in its content and its use by radical right-wing groups, among others, the attack on digital platforms is not necessarily the most effective measure to stop the rise of crime, on the contrary, it represents a dangerous precedent by criminalizing tools that in other contexts could facilitate the private communication (Telegram chats are not encrypted by default. That is a setting that the user must activate) of groups of human rights defenders, communities, social movements and other people whose work depends largely on being able to enjoy safe conditions, free of interference, for their communications.

A less famous case is that of Anom and the operation known under names such as Trojan Shield, Ironside or Greenlight, where a provider of encrypted telephony devices (Phantom Secure) approached the FBI in order to offer them the possibility of installing backdoors on their devices through the Anom application, an offer that the bureau accepted in order to distribute the devices in criminal circles under the promise of obtaining private communications, to then have privileged access to their communications and thus be able to dismantle networks of illicit activities such as arms, drug and human trafficking, money laundering, hitmen, among others. The coordinated operation between different intelligence agencies ended with millions of dollars seized, as well as luxury cars, drug shipments and more than 800 alleged criminals arrested in 16 countries. In a more local context, the operation even had an impact on the shipment of drugs from Ecuador to Brussels, since the agents were aware of all the details of the criminal activities of the criminal groups in charge of this operation.

Now, this case raises the question of whether it is necessary for law enforcement to infiltrate encrypted communication platforms in order to stop the advance of organized crime. The truth is that, if we put into perspective the benefits of end-to-end encryption, compared to the potential illegal activities intervened, definitely the protections that technologies such as encryption can provide to groups usually persecuted, such as activists, journalists, defenders of the territory, among others, are significantly more relevant.

Platforms are tools designed to solve certain problems; the use we decide to give them is based on ethical principles that shape our way of acting as part of a society. The same tool used to coordinate criminal acts can help coordinate actions of civil society organizations, like human rights defenders, and that is why we must prioritize the positive contributions of applications that enhance the defense and strengthening of privacy. Encryption can easily become the determining factor between life and death for people and communities at risk around the world.

For all of the above, states must guarantee protection measures for the encryption of communications and refrain from violating the protections that keep our privacy safe and we, as consumers of technologies, must make conscious use of them, where not only we value our economic capacity to access safer alternatives, but we also consider that if technology has made it possible for our rights to be more protected, our responsibility to exercise them is unavoidable.