Registered sex offenders sending pictures of their dicks to teenagers who are foolish enough in their youth to share their Snapchat name publicly in hopes of making a social connection.
Not national security, but an arguably reasonable law enforcement target.
Depending on how puritanical the District Attorney and/or the Judge are, yes (how safe their office is come election time figures into it too - "Vote for me, I'm tough on crime!").
It's not rare to read about some teen that is having to register as a sex offender for doing the kind of things teens have been doing for a long time, it's just that now technology keeps the evidence around and accessible.
Not production. Having pictures of yourself is fine in most western jurisdictions (US, UK, rest of Europe) though it is more problematic (or just plain stoning-is-too-good-for-you illegal) some paces elsewhere.
As soon as the image is sent though, most legislatures consider that pornographic distribution. Here in the UK for instance you could at least be prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act.
Having such a picture of someone else is also against the letter of the relevant laws even if the subject of the image sent it to you.
Like laws covering the age of consent for explicit sexual activity (which varies between 14 and 21 depending on where you are and sometimes depending on your gender and orientation) it gets more complicated if an image crosses state borders (sender and recipient being in different states/countries). Generally speaking you would find yourself judged against the strictest of the laws involved, not the most lenient, where there is variation.
Yep, society cooperates with law enforcement. It's been that way for about six or seven thousand years. In this case it was in response to search warrants. If you're not outraged, you've been paying enough attention.
To many, the dream of the Internet was a space to challenge and re-evaluate these structures. Something likened to starting fresh, naive as it may be.
People have been disappointed with the seeming death of this dream, and very recent revelations have exposed just how much that dream failed to be achieved. And very vocal, as one would expect from a league of very frustrated dreamers.
I hadn't heard of the app before now, but I'm not finding much sympathy for users of a system built on the premise that they should not have access to data on their own device.
Anyway, a clarification of the headline: not only 'unopened' snaps, but also those that have not yet been opened by all nominated recipients. So if a law enforcement agent can have themselves invited into a Snapchat circle they can take advantage of that fact to persist the image on the server until it is legally demanded.
No who uses snapchat think it's super secure as everyone realises you can just take a screenshot (app detects this and notifies the sender), or you can just take a photo with another camera.
It's just about making it harder for the average user to save a potentially embarrassing photo and allow you to send fun pics that are too crappy to put onto facebook/twitter.
If the law enforcement has a proper warrants signed by court, no wonder they are complying with it, there's nothing to "admit". It's like "admitting" if the police stops you on the road, you'd show your driver's license to them. What else could they do? The fact they continue to function makes it obvious they comply with court orders - we all know what happens to those who don't.
The definition of "proper warrant" is rather shaky as it is these days. Besides that, there methods (short of shuttering your business in protest) to prevent access to data without denying access to law enforcement. You can't divulge what you don't know: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/a-court-order-is-a...
Of course, this is complicated for images, not to mention resource intensive, but it's entirely possible to lock down your services to a point where you literally cannot divulge information on your users since you don't have it.
A friend and I came up with a rule of thumb. If there's an internet company and at least 1 in 20 of your friend group is familiar with it then it's probably worth a billion dollars on paper.
Obviously that doesn't make sense, but neither does any valuation in tech right now.
If they are targeting a system like snapchat which has at least made some effort to make data retention and recovery a bit harder (in the company own interest and/or its users), is it presumable that they are also after messaging systems which make substantially less or no effort at all to limit data retention like for example kik messager which is getting bigger and bigger? (not to talk about whatsapp where, adding to this, your ID is your phone number...)?
Wait, I thought SnapChat doesn't save any images. Wasn't that the whole marketing ploy? How would you have files to even hand over? Seems their DB should be virtually empty.
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