> I would argue that the conversations that have gone online are the interactions that were previously happening in-person (at least in term of criminal activity), to which the FBI didn't have access before.
Indeed. But those conversations/meetings were visible, risky etc. They were thus possible to monitor/attack and they weren't scalable.
From the perspective of law enforcement, criminals being able to discuss crimes or make payments without there being a phyiscal exchange is a nightmare. In the past, they could monitor meetings between criminals. Now they basically need to look over the shoulder of criminals in order to prove that CriminalA spoke to CriminalB. It must be extremely difficult.
Not really, even at my work we have (well, had) regular swap-meets for supermarket discount trackers. So one week I would shop as badge #1, the next week I would be badge #2. Just knowing the identity of the person who was issued the account doesn't give you any information about who's using it now.
In aggregate, you would still be able to identify which group of people used which endpoints, but aggregate information won't hold up in court.
Yes, geolocation would solve that, but I would expect such people to absolutely disable the GPS, so you'd need to rely on cell tower pings, which are not found on the same servers.
Indeed. But those conversations/meetings were visible, risky etc. They were thus possible to monitor/attack and they weren't scalable.
From the perspective of law enforcement, criminals being able to discuss crimes or make payments without there being a phyiscal exchange is a nightmare. In the past, they could monitor meetings between criminals. Now they basically need to look over the shoulder of criminals in order to prove that CriminalA spoke to CriminalB. It must be extremely difficult.