How it actually works
> the French man-in-the-middle'd an Encrochat server. From there police deployed malicious updates across the Encrochat network to dump unencrypted images of users' handsets back to servers they controlled, bypassing encryption altogether by simply reading off chats direct from user endpoints.
That is how. They do the same thing with the rather more popular and equally E2E encrypted Whatsapp. They are detain you and confiscate your phone, which is then imaged and the plain text message archive extracted from it, or they send you a nasty in one of various ways at their disposal and discreetly exfiltrate the data.
The only possible rational explanation for wanting to ban encryption is wanting to conduct mass surveillance, in spite of that being illegal. Until now, the only thing that differentiated us from the old iron curtain states was that liberal democracies did, by and large, refrain from breaking their own laws: spying was illegal in the iron curtain states too, which is why they had to do it more or less surreptitiously. It was their habit of doing it en masse anyway that set them apart from most of the West.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
