Hackers selling hacked police emails to request user data from TikTok, Facebook (opens in new tab)

I want public no pay-to-play legal systems.

Well if they have nothing to hide then what's the issue, officer?

False advertising.

"Hey Timmy I noticed you talk to Susan 5 times a day sometimes for 5 minutes and sometimes for 2 hours. Always right after you say goodnight to us. Sometimes I see you call her late at night from outside her house for 10 seconds when you were supposed to be in your room and then you don't use your phone again for a couple hours -- No no, im not invading your privacy, it's only metadata"

Meta data is often as valuable or even more valuable than the data itself.

Because you might be talking to the mob boss about the weather. But the fact that you are talking to the mob boss is an extremely interesting data point. It pins you to the map in a way that you are immediately a POI and causes a file to be opened on you and your other contacts to further map your place in the network. Who talks to who is very powerful information.

> only

"We kill people based on metadata." - General Michael Hayden, former director NSA and CIA

That's enough to tell you if a given request is being seriously discussed.

Never buillding a back door for LEOs sounds like a reasonable option.

For some absurd reason fax is often seen by bureaucracies in some countries as “more secure” than email.

Don't you think it's within the social media companies interest to respond to as few subpeonas as possible i.e. only genuine ones from authorities?

but maybe you're right and this problem won't be solved because the person being harmed has no power and the institution in power sees no harm

Interestingly, gmail trusts the from field, so if I send a message “from” you to your account, it will put it in your sent folder.

Urban legend says people have been fired after forged harassment emails were delivered this way.

Google claims this is a feature, and the sent “label” isn’t meant to mean that it came from your gmail account.

For instance, there could be a corporate service firehosing spam at coworkers on your behalf, and obviously you don’t want to notice that, so it puts it in the sent box.

If the email account has been hacked (which it has in this case) then it can just go back to the original hacked email.

Generally email systems will have rules that support things like “if this account gets any mail from this address at Facebook.com, move it to some obscure folder and forward it to badguy@gmail.com” which is sometimes how this plays out.