Police could lawfully use bulk surveillance techniques to access messages from encrypted communications platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal, following a ruling by the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), a court has heard.
The headline is a little misleading. The actual ruling is that police can obtain warrants to install surveillance malware on phones when they have evidence the owner is using it to communicate about crimes.
Could malware be installed without access to the physical phone? How would this be achieved. Is it with a backdoor from the phone manufacturer or infected somehow from the sim card service provider.
Depending on circumstances it can be done remotely in different ways AFAIK using things like IMSI Catchers, malicious and sometimes invisible SMS messages, and maybe spearfishing or other methods. Or a combination of things, leveraging different weaknesses of the phone in question.
And because this could just enable government bodies to fuck around with spying, that’s why usually you have to get a warrant for this kinda stuff on the grounds of probable cause.
This is much much harder though, and would risk exposing the vulnerabilities they are using, so they likely won’t use these methods unless it’s higher profile and involves some higher up govt entities. Your normal street crime cop shop won’t be able to do this.
Likely as not, person charged with crime is in custody. Police force person to unlock phone, then police install malware and wait for comms to come in.
You’d have to be a real idiot to keep using the same phone after the police arrested you and forced you to unlock it
