The Greek Police is ready to "hack" the conversations on Viber and Whatsapp

Ready to "hack" conversations in Viber and Whatsapp is Greek police, something that will surely make many citizens feel… quite uncomfortable.

ΣAt the end of October, a group of EYP executives went to England where they seem to have attended a demonstration of a system that monitors these applications, while there is a corresponding interest from EL.AS services, such as the Information Management Directorate and the Counter-Terrorism Service.

Similar systems for Viber and Whatsapp are available in the USA, Great Britain, France and other countries.

According to "Vima tis Kyriakis", the procurement of these systems, which has been considered an absolute priority by the security authorities and the secret services, is expected to change the data in the investigations for the dismantling of criminal organizations that use 70-80% Viber and Whatsapp for their communication.

However, it will also change the way hundreds of thousands of citizens knew that Viber could not be monitored until now. and used the specific internet platforms for confidential conversations and for the exchange of files and other data.

The reason cited by ELAS

According to the police, this will happen because of the last three years Most of the investigations into the activities of gangs, armed groups and fanatical Islamists, had found a dead end due to the mass use of Viber and Whatsapp that can not be monitored by the systems.

This is because they are not interconnected with the mobile telephony providers, they have complex decryption systems, while they also require the existence of huge electronic storage spaces.

The security authorities, after some special reports or "gaps" in various negotiations, found that the main stakeholders were activating Viber, Whatsapp and about 1.000 other internet telephony programs (VoIP - Voice Over Internet Protocol), from where, according to the police, they were talking to security without researchers understanding what they are saying.

In addition, they could not form sufficient "mapping" of calls between different suspects to identify persons and connections. In fact, for this reason - as it is said by ELAS - in recent criminal acts, unknown persons had attempted to destroy the mobile phones of victims of criminal acts, because only through them could it be ascertained what critical data for their activities might be were recorded on Viber and Whatsapp.

Israeli and British systems

The systems that the Greek authorities are about to acquire are mainly those of Israeli or British companies. and initially have the ability to record the cycle of telephone conversation contacts via Viber, WhatsApp etc. as well as the location of the phones making the calls.

This is considered extremely important in order to be able to identify suspects in places where criminal acts are committed and then to create profiles with members of criminal organizations based on the sequence of calls.

Robbery of messages, files, conversations

This system also provides an important feature for hijacking files and messages exchanged via Viber and Whatsapp. However, in some cases there will be the possibility of monitoring the content of the conversations, since it seems that there is the possibility - in consultation with some companies of mobile internet applications and international police cooperation - to give the key numbers to decrypt the conversations.

The acquisition of special software such as "Pegasus", an Israeli company, is also being studied, in order to trap the suspicious phone by sending messages and to record all the movements made by the user from any conventional or internet application.

At the same time, of course, all this is expected to be a concern for the protection of citizens' personal data, since no one wants to feel that what someone says, sends or writes is monitored by the police.

There are also many who ask the question whether the police through Viber and Whatsapp will purely monitor the criminals, or not only.

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