Aditya Verma sent a Snapchat message in July 2022 saying he was about to "blow up" a plane.

TL;DR

Don’t use snapchat

In general I agree, but there’s no privacy on airport Wi-Fi. And very little at an airport in general.

Snapchat gave the info to police. From BBC:

On its website, in a section titled “How We Work with Law Enforcement Authorities”, Snapchat says one of its goals is to “maintain a safe and fun environment where Snapchatters are free to express themselves and stay in touch with their real friends”.

It adds: "We also work to proactively escalate to law enforcement any content appearing to involve imminent threats to life, such as school shooting threats, bomb threats and missing persons cases, and respond to law enforcement’s emergency requests for disclosure of data when law enforcement is handling a case involving an imminent threat to life.

I wouldn’t expect my data to be secure, but I wouldn’t expect to be prosecuted as if I had willfully made it a public statement.

deleted by creator

Shouldn’t it be all encrypted with SSL?

All the airport wifi could do is see the DNS requests (and the modern trend is to have DoH or DoT enabled by default, for example in the up to date versions of Android)

it’s probably some sort of Snapchat automatic alert detecting the words bomb or Taliban.

Probably more likely to be surveillance of Snapchat.

From the article:

A court in Madrid heard it was assumed the message triggered alarm bells after being picked up via Gatwick’s Wi-Fi network.

Public wifi without a VPN is like sex without a condom. The connection may not be encrypted (very risky) and even if it is, you are still susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks: https://www.garlandtechnology.com/blog/how-to-monitor-encrypted-traffic-and-keep-your-network-secure

I guarantee there will be a flood of articles about this over the next few days because of what I quoted above.

It’s also possible that one of his “friends” reported him or something like that.

Please explain to me how using Public WiFi is unsafe if the traffic is encrypted with TLS. Unless they somehow installed a keylogger on everyone connected to said Wifi and picked it up from there, the only way this was possible was on some quick text analysis and recognising the IP address from Snapchat

The link I provided explains it. They can decrypt traffic through their own devices.

"A key question in the case was how the message got out, considering Snapchat is an encrypted app.

One theory, raised in the trial, was that it could have been intercepted via Gatwick’s Wi-Fi network. But a spokesperson for the airport told BBC News that its network “does not have that capability”.

In the judge’s resolution, cited by the Europa Press news agency, it was said that the message, “for unknown reasons, was captured by the security mechanisms of England when the plane was flying over French airspace”."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68099669

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