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Comment by A4ET8a8uTh0 | Hacker News Reader

It is a fascinating case, but apart from the technical aspect of it.. how is that not entrapment? FBI effectively created a tool explicitly designed for criminal element and 'marketed' as such.

I would ask about legality, but I am worried its in a very, very grey area.

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I am most certainly not a lawyer, but from what i've read entrapment is pretty narrowly defined in America. There's a ton of stuff that many people would view as entrapment that the courts wouldn't consider to be entrapment.

This is one instance though where even from a layperson definition I'm really not sure how this could possibly be interpreted as entrapment.

"The key aspect of entrapment is this: Government agents do not entrap defendants simply by offering them an opportunity to commit a crime. Judges expect people to resist any ordinary temptation to violate the law. An entrapment defense arises when government agents resort to repugnant behavior such as the use of threats, harassment, fraud, or even flattery to induce defendants to commit crimes."[1] [1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/entrapment-basics-33...

This isn't entrapment. Entrapment is when the government forces you to commit a crime not when the government provides all the tools required to commit a crime without any coercion. Unless you can show you were pressured/forced to do the crime by the government it's assumed you would have done it the same if the situation arose without the government being the other party, because you already did and presumably you didn't know they were cops.

I mean they had 10,000 users and 800 arrests. That's an 8% criminality rate, it seems like they didn't entrap anyone who wasn't committing crimes anyway. Entrapment is about trapping people in a situation where committing crimes is the best option available. Selling people a secure phone does not do that.

That or careful individuals still used coded messages.

That said, I think and other posters have a point about entrapment. Needless to say, I am not a lawyer.

How so? Selling and using secure messaging apps is perfectly legal, and they never told anyone "go commit [crime X] and plan it with this device"

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