A British man accused of public disorder after joking about blowing up a flight has gone on trial in Spain.
Aditya Verma made the comment on Snapchat on his way to the island of Menorca with friends in July 2022.
The message, sent before Mr Verma departed Gatwick airport, read: "On my way to blow up the plane (I'm a member of the Taliban)." Mr Verma told a Madrid court on Monday: "The intention was never to cause public distress or cause public harm."
If found guilty, the university student faces a hefty bill for expenses after two Spanish Air Force jets were scrambled.
Mr Verma's message was picked up by the UK security services who flagged it to Spanish authorities while the easyJet plane was still in the air.
A court in Madrid heard it was assumed the message triggered alarm bells after being picked up via Gatwick's Wi-Fi network.
Appearing in court on Monday, Mr Verma - who is now studying economics at Bath University - said the message was "a joke in a private group setting".
"It was just sent to my friends I was travelling with on the day," he said. Pressed about the purpose of the message, Mr Verma said: "Since school, it's been a joke because of my features... It was just to make people laugh."
So no one involved in the private Snapchat message reported this to Spanish authorities, the UK government intercepted private communications, read it, and misinterpreted a private joke as real threat.
Just imagine how western media reporting on this if it happened in China.
I just realised they called it a hoax rather than a joke. The joke was said in private company, nobody was expected to be fooled, it's not a hoax.
Exactly, everybody in the conversation knew this was a joke. There was no intent to do harm or to fool the public. The whole case is nonsense.
It's so "literally 1984" that citizens are expected to know that their private conversations are watched and can make authorities lose money if they react to it. You can't make this shit up
as always, everything they fear monger would happen under communism actually happens under capitalism
If the student isn't heavily prosecuted, there's going to be a tiktok trend of doing this to your mate's phone when they're not looking.
I had a guy joke at work today -- he pointed to his friend who had liquor and said "psst, that's Bin Laden's son".
I looked between them and said "Oh my god, I'm such a fan of your father's work!"
Inb4 joke police storm my apartment and kill me
kill me
you mean recruit you into doing domestic terrorism to justify their own existence
British boy look out... Your swag is too different... your posts are too fire...
In case you were ever wondering if Snapchat is to be trusted with your privacy.
So someone makes an obvious joke in a private chat about blowing up a plane, then the authorities launch fighter jets to do what exactly? What were the jets for? Were they going to blow up the plane to prevent a terrorist blowing up the plane?
Perhaps the entire scenario was run by an a series of algorithms - from flagging the text in the group chat right through to the scramble jets order, with no human at any point reading anything and taking a moment to think about what it actually meant or what the implications really were. Maybe we can add an AI commanded NATO Air Force to the list of shit this article has inadvertently leaked.
I guess they were there just incase the plane was hijacked. But doesn't make sense because they could ask the cockpit about that directly.
"Uhhhh control tower, why are there two fighter planes flanking me????"
Were they going to blow up the plane to prevent a terrorist blowing up the plane?
Yes, but the jets would've made sure the plane fell on a major city to justify increasing the military, policing, and border budget.
True but this is probably Snapchat's internal law enforcement compliance unit SnapLion. Wait what am I saying, that means the same thing
This entire thing is insane, the UK monitors another country's internet traffic and private messages, and thinks it can prosecute a man because of an obvious joke made in private i mean are ANY journalists able to point out how batshit insane this entire thing is? Are journalists this fucking incompetent now? I'm going to lose my god damn mind
This is blatant abuse of power by the state, and the fact that it's being presented as a totally reasonable thing is absolutely mind blowing.
would be a good thing if anglos had their actual minds blown, violently, and permanently.
Careful, the U.K. security services are probably reading these replies. They might arrest you for ‘inciting genocide’.
yes, i wish all westerners would die, now please send one of your shitty DRM locked jets to my appartment. Hopefully the license runs out midflight and it crashes through my window and kills me, that way i wont have to read those stupid headlines anymore.
Having no critical thinking skills is a must to get hired as a journalist in mainstream media.
Love the idea that MI5 or whatever, thinks the first thing a terrorist would so before an attack would be post about it to their friends.
Got this image in my head of some grindbro terrorist posting a selfie in front of a huge pile of people he killed, and being roasted in the comments by his mates 'cos they counted the fingers and clocked it as an AI deepfake.
Kind of reminds me of how some ppl say they got accounts blocked by banks because they put stuff like "isis funding" in the concept when making transactions to friends.
I am sure that plenty of ordinary British citizens are grateful that their tax dollars are going to efforts like this.
After all, the United Kingdom is a democracy. That must mean that one day everybody voted on being monitored.
Not really? It was the internal network on the public wifi that detected several redflag words and flagged the message. EVERYTHING you do on public wifi is visible to the owner of the network. Yes, that means that if they went to take the time, a cafe owner could figure out what you were looking up at a certain time.
It’s probably understandable that the system at an airport would flag messages being sent from inside the airport about guns, the Taliban, explosions, and destroying planes.
EVERYTHING you do on public wifi is visible to the owner of the network.
Contents of tls and end to end encrypted requests should not be visible to the owner
"The platform uses end-to-end encryption for photographs exchanged between Snapchat users. Text messages and other messages transmitted using Snapchat are not encrypted in the same way. Because Snapchat doesn’t release much information about the encryption it employs, it might be difficult to fully comprehend what happens to your messages after they reach Snap’s servers."
There is obviously some sort of plain text inspection going on. This is obvious.
Never trust advertising.
That has nothing to do with TLS, TLS just means it's encrypted while in transit to Snapchats servers, so nobody on the local network or any router it hops through can snoop on it, but Snapchat obviously will still get the message and do with it what they want.
This is what ppl are saying, it's probably not on the local network, since that would be prevented by using TLS which almost everything uses by default these days, but Snapchat itself eavesdropping and sending it along to law enforcement
There's no "probably" about it; this was not intercepted on the local AP, period. As you said, this was done through the five-eyes endpoints dedicated to intelligence agencies on snapchat's server side.
Oh yeah absolutely, I just hate being forceful like that lol
like what if I am wrong though
I don't know for a fact, but almost certainly, Snapchat encrypts messages, because otherwise it's not just the owner of the wifi network, but also other users who could read everything you write. This is most likely Snapchat sharing your chats with the UK state in real time.
Snapchat text messages are not e2e encrypted. If they were, the state should not be able to read them without compromising or searching the device or having a rat in the group chat.
They transit encrypted to Snapchat's servers, which then can read them and forward them to NSA/GCHQ as they please (let's be honest it's probably on tap for them without any request). Snapchat itself was always extremely sus to me, because its business model makes no sense and it's the perfect place to get snaps of confidential company info as workers think they're just sending streaks to friends, and also kompromat.
They aren't end to end encrypted. But they're still TLS encrypted to the snapchat server.
And you trust the company to be truthful with this… why?
They’re obviously lying.
Going back. Then how did the airport wifi detect and flag the message if the encryption is a verifiable fact? It’s obviously not encrypted if that’s what happened, or the encryption means nothing if the network was able to read it.
The airport wifi didn't detect nor flag anything. I have answered your question previously in the chain, when I talked about the documented collaboration between Snapchat and the 14 eyes security services that actually flagged the message.
Simple answer: it's not what happened
I looked at some other articles about it and they make it clear it's just speculation from a friend of his, not a conclusion come to by anyone remotely knowledgeable
I am like three replies deep and people keep saying this. It doesn't have to be end to end encrypted, just encrypted on its way to Snapchat servers in the most mild manner possible. It would be totally idiotic to have it any other way. Do you know if Snapchat messages are literally sent as plain .txt for anybody to eavesdrop? Can anyone demonstrate this? It sounds easy. Even my Hexbear messages are encrypted and hidden from view from other people on my network.
That's not how the internet works. Your example is also wrong. As long as you're visiting sites that use HTTPS with TLS, the cafe owner will not be able to see the exact page or index that you are on, just that you visited the website. So for instance, the cafe owner will be able to see that you visited lemmygrad.ml, but they will not be able to see what threads or posts you were viewing on lemmygrad.ml.
What probably happened here is that Snapchat itself picked up the message, because as you have previously said, Snapchat has no end to end encryption policy for text messages, so they themselves, in theory, can access them. Therefore, they were able to pick up on some key words (probably using an automated system or internal tool) in the message, and alert the relevant law enforcement agencies.
This is flat wrong. Any OS made in the last 10 years (at least) will alert you if you connect to an unencrypted AP.
Not end to end encrypted /=/ not encrypted at all.
End to end encryption = service owner cannot decrypt and read the contents of transmitted data, it's encrypted on source device, decrypted on end device, encrypted throughout transit with keys/information that the transiting devices and network do not possess.
What we're talking about here is normal web encryption or client to server (transit) encryption.
Let the equals signs indicate encrypted data transmission and <> indicate the end of such encryption at connection endpoints.
ClientA (sender of message) <==> Snapchat Servers <==> other clientB (recipient of message) (There are two distinction connections here, one from clientA, the other from clientB, they do not directly connect in this example)
The snapchat servers establish the encrypted connections to both end user devices for relaying messages. However the messages are not encrypted when they reach the servers, the servers and snapchat infrastructure and personnel can see the messages and act upon them like any other data.
MITM'ing the connection 2000s style is not necessary. Snapchat and nearly any other large company that doesn't provide end2end encrypted messaging has both automated systems which scan for keywords and sentiment as well as manual review teams to review flagged content and send tips on it quickly to national and local police. In addition many participate in sharing all data with intelligence agencies in the NATO EYES network of agencies such as NSA and GCHQ who themselves perform scanning and sentiment analysis and such on the content.
As to subverting e2e if you control the code you can just have the applications look for certain flags or indicators on the messages once received/sent (and decrypted as apps must be able to decrypt them themselves) and then open connections (TLS web cert transit encrypted) to the company servers and re-transmit the decrypted data along with associated metadata. There's also stuff with key management for systems that allow multiple devices for users without manual approval where the company could have something that silently adds a special GCHQ/NSA box as an additional device for every single account and generates keys for it and forwards all messages to it but does not disclose this to the user and in such a way the company could technically be unable to access such data themselves while still providing access to intelligence agencies and call that e2e (and it would be just not what we consider properly implemented e2e).
Wait for real? That’s hilariously ironic given their entire purpose.
They say that picture and video snaps are, but they refuse to reveal how unlike other services.
They are extremely dodgy in answering if text messages are encrypted, and from what I’ve seen it looks like pure advertising.
This would be case in point of a public network was somehow able to read and flag the message.
a public network was somehow able to read and flag the message
That did not happen - snapchat would refuse to connect to its server completely if the cert wasn't recognized, so even with one of these awful MITM inspection gateways present (by itself unlikely anyway in an airport AP / outside of a corporate network, because they couldn't deploy their custom CA to the clients) it would've been impossible.
This was obtained through snapchat itself providing the logs real time to GCHQ.
A friend and I tried emailing each other fake terror plans in 2004 because we wanted the FBI to shutdown our high school. Maybe the technology wasn't there yet, or maybe the British are better than the US at the digital side of the whole police state thing
