Governments absolutely abhor anybody who threatens their real-time monitoring of your thoughts, sight, speech and movement.

Why would criminals use specific apps like this and not just something like Signal? Or Session for an example of an Australian app.

More information: https://www.afp.gov.au/news-centre/media-release/afp-operati...

“Authorities in Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United States worked with Europol and Eurojust, the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation, to map the platform’s global infrastructure” [1].

Going to withhold judgement until we get more details on how they operated and marketed themselves.

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/police-ghost-encryption-app-...

This is of particular interest/concern to me.

A colleague and I have devised[0] a messaging system that is encrypted, and resists traffic analysis. This is of legitimate interest to people have have reason to fear the authorities in their areas ... people like journalists.

And freedom fighters. And "The Resistance".

And ordinary people like you and me who simply don't want the Government to sweep up all our communications, eventually break it, and then mine it for anything and everything.

And yet, if it's genuinely secure we are at risk of being arrested and charged with anything they can think of, because it might be used by "the bad guys."

So what do we do with our invention?

[0] Please don't respond with things like "Never roll your own crypto".[1]

[1] Nor with Schneier’s Law[2]: “any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it.”

[2] It dates back even earlier[3]: "One of the most singular characteristics of the art of deciphering is the strong conviction possessed by every person, even moderately acquainted with it, that he is able to construct a cipher which nobody else can decipher. -- Charles Babbage, 1864

[3] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/schneiers_law...

Added in edit: I genuinely don't understand what's triggering the downvotes here. Is it just that you don't believe me? I was kinda hoping to get some genuinely useful feedback.