A British man accused of public disorder after joking about blowing up a flight has gone on trial in Spain.
Aditya Verma made the comment on Snapchat on his way to the island of Menorca with friends in July 2022.
The message, sent before Mr Verma departed Gatwick airport, read: “On my way to blow up the plane (I’m a member of the Taliban).” Mr Verma told a Madrid court on Monday: “The intention was never to cause public distress or cause public harm.”
If found guilty, the university student faces a hefty bill for expenses after two Spanish Air Force jets were scrambled.
Mr Verma’s message was picked up by the UK security services who flagged it to Spanish authorities while the easyJet plane was still in the air.
A court in Madrid heard it was assumed the message triggered alarm bells after being picked up via Gatwick’s Wi-Fi network.
Appearing in court on Monday, Mr Verma - who is now studying economics at Bath University - said the message was “a joke in a private group setting”.
“It was just sent to my friends I was travelling with on the day,” he said. Pressed about the purpose of the message, Mr Verma said: “Since school, it’s been a joke because of my features… It was just to make people laugh.”
So no one involved in the private Snapchat message reported this to Spanish authorities, the UK government intercepted private communications, read it, and misinterpreted a private joke as real threat.
Just imagine how western media reporting on this if it happened in China.
Snapchat text messages are not e2e encrypted. If they were, the state should not be able to read them without compromising or searching the device or having a rat in the group chat.
They transit encrypted to Snapchat’s servers, which then can read them and forward them to NSA/GCHQ as they please (let’s be honest it’s probably on tap for them without any request). Snapchat itself was always extremely sus to me, because its business model makes no sense and it’s the perfect place to get snaps of confidential company info as workers think they’re just sending streaks to friends, and also kompromat.
Snapchat messages and text are not end to end encrypted.
They aren’t end to end encrypted. But they’re still TLS encrypted to the snapchat server.
And you trust the company to be truthful with this… why?
They’re obviously lying.
?
It’s a verifiable fact go download Wireshark.
Going back. Then how did the airport wifi detect and flag the message if the encryption is a verifiable fact? It’s obviously not encrypted if that’s what happened, or the encryption means nothing if the network was able to read it.
The airport wifi didn’t detect nor flag anything. I have answered your question previously in the chain, when I talked about the documented collaboration between Snapchat and the 14 eyes security services that actually flagged the message.
Simple answer: it’s not what happened
I looked at some other articles about it and they make it clear it’s just speculation from a friend of his, not a conclusion come to by anyone remotely knowledgeable
I am like three replies deep and people keep saying this. It doesn’t have to be end to end encrypted, just encrypted on its way to Snapchat servers in the most mild manner possible. It would be totally idiotic to have it any other way. Do you know if Snapchat messages are literally sent as plain .txt for anybody to eavesdrop? Can anyone demonstrate this? It sounds easy. Even my Hexbear messages are encrypted and hidden from view from other people on my network.