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The banker loving, baby-eating Tory party thread (regenerated)


blandy

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On 05/08/2021 at 19:11, Davkaus said:

Heriditary peer, makes agreements to give £85,000,000 of taxpayer money to his aquaintances using his personal WhatsApp, outside of the formal process, and accidentally replaces his phone, losing evidence a few months after being given notice that it would be subject to judicial review.

Where do you even start with this tale of sleeze? 

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/aug/04/covid-contracts-minister-lord-bethell-replaced-phone-before-it-could-be-searched

Going back to this:

The Bethell case is particularly bothersome:

Lord Bethell’s new phone

'Lord Bethell is the Health Minister responsible for overseeing the award of Covid contracts. His time as Health Minister has been mired in controversy: from failing to declare meetings with firms that won huge Government contracts, to using his personal email address to conduct Government business. Good Law Project has a particular interest in the role he played in the controversial award of lucrative contracts to Abingdon Health.

Last week in Court, we argued against the Government’s attempts to apply blanket redactions to documents relating to the Abingdon Health contracts. We were successful – an important step towards transparency.

But the hearing uncovered something more alarming. In sworn evidence, Government admitted that some of Lord Bethell’s dealings with Abingdon had been conducted via WhatsApp or text message, and were held only on his private mobile phone. If that was the case for Abingdon, why not other VIPs too? 

What’s more, in December last year, Lord Bethell was told his mobile phone would be searched for documents relating to this case. Just weeks later, it seems, he ‘replaced’ his phone because, Government lawyers say, it was ‘broken’. They are now not sure it will be possible to retrieve the WhatsApp and text messages.'

more at: https://goodlawproject.org/update/lord-bethell-new-phone/

Now, pardon me if I'm being quite tech-illiterate here, but isn't it actually harder *not* to connect your new phone to the previous WhatsApp account? And how 'broken' does a phone have to be that retrieving these messages is impossible?

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If only there were enough police to ride their horses up and down the beach for instagram, beat up women on peace vigils AND investigate political corruption.

I guess we can’t have everything.

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Quote

David Cameron made about $10m (£7m) from Greensill Capital before the finance company collapsed, documents obtained by BBC Panorama suggest.

The documents indicate the former prime minister received $4.5m after cashing in Greensill shares in 2019.

Greensill, which made its money by lending to businesses, went into administration in March, leaving investors facing billions in losses.

Mr Cameron's spokesman said his remuneration was a private matter.

Link

 

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12 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

Not that this is in any way a defence of them or a suggestion that it wasn't on purpose... but are whatsapp messages able to be used as evidence in stuff like this?

Why do you suspect they wouldn't be?

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16 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

Not that this is in any way a defence of them or a suggestion that it wasn't on purpose... but are whatsapp messages able to be used as evidence in stuff like this?

Only if they haven't been accidentally deleted and replaced by a new burner phone which purposefully didn't link to the account. 

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27 minutes ago, bickster said:

Why do you suspect they wouldn't be?

I seem to remember some sort of case where WhatsApp were refusing to release messages to the FBI or something like that because they were encrypted and it would be violating privacy laws or something.

But I may well be totally misremembering it

Edited by Stevo985
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3 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

I seem to remember some sort of case where WhatsApp were refusing to release messages to the FBI or something like that because they were encrypted and it would be violating privacy laws or something.

But I may well be totally misremembering it

Yes, I get that but here the messages were requested as evidence in court, refusal to allow access by the owner of the messages would be contempt of court. Whatsapp themselves don't come into the equation

All that is required is a Production Order Warrant, granted by the court, failure to comply with the order is contempt of court and can carry a jail sentence. I deal with a lot of these in work

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Nothing you said is incorrect there @bickster, but @Stevo985's half-remembered case involves WhatsApp refusing to hand over messages because they literally couldn't in a case similar to this where the messages couldn't be taken off the device anymore. WhatApp may hold various metadata, but only people with direct access to a device at either end can decrypt the message contents, which is why it's so unfortunate that this device was accidentally damaged beyond repair. In theory what I suppose could be done is using info on WhatsApp's servers to identify third party contacts and seizing their devices as evidence to obtain the messages that way, I'm not sure there's precedent for that though.

Edited by Davkaus
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1 hour ago, Davkaus said:

Nothing you said is incorrect there @bickster, but @Stevo985's half-remembered case involves WhatsApp refusing to hand over messages because they literally couldn't in a case similar to this where the messages couldn't be taken off the device anymore. WhatApp may hold various metadata, but only people with direct access to a device at either end can decrypt the message contents, which is why it's so unfortunate that this device was accidentally damaged beyond repair. In theory what I suppose could be done is using info on WhatsApp's servers to identify third party contacts and seizing their devices as evidence to obtain the messages that way, I'm not sure there's precedent for that though.

Yeah I think that's what I was remembering. Possibly they had the phone as well but Apple refused to unlock it for the police/FBI?

I'm sure it was something like that.

Like I said I was probably misremembering, it was just something in the back of my head that was telling me it was... complicated... to use Whatsapp messages as evidence

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Ah, the Apple case was a much bigger deal. Apple also didn't have the ability to decrypt a device for the authorities, but were ordered to essentially write a version of iOS that allowed them to unlock it for the FBI who were investigating a mass shooting. They were prepared to challenge it in court but the FBI backed out so it never got in front of a judge.

In most cases they'd simply compel the suspect to unlock the device - in the UK it's a separate criminal offence to not provide the details to unlock a device, with a maximum sentence of up to 5 years.

Edited by Davkaus
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27 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

Ah, the Apple case was a much bigger deal. Apple also didn't have the ability to decrypt a device for the authorities

I reckon they could, but understand why their official stance was they couldn’t.

They we’re concerned that if they did it once then the authorities would take the piss and ask for it for every suspect they had in custody. It wasn’t specifically about the 1 case the police wanted help with.

I have a feeling if it was a major act of terrorism the phone would miraculously become unlocked.

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