How to Share Secret Messages Without Resorting to “folders”
Electronic communications can still leave a paper trail, as former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort recently learned when his bail was canceled for alleged witness interference while he was under house arrest pending two lawsuits.
Prosecutors have accused Manafort of using WhatsApp to send encrypted messages to possible witnesses, as well as using a practice called a “folder” where a person writes an email but does not send it, but saves it in the email client’s Drafts folder. Then other people with the password for that email account can log in, read the email in the Drafts folder, and delete it before sending.
Manafort did not invent the technique: Former CIA chief David Petraeus was arrested using folders to contact his biographer when they were having an affair, and al Qaeda is suspected of using the practice back in 2005 . He even appears in the 2008 spy film Traitor .
The idea is that since the saved draft email is never sent, metadata showing the transmission time and the IP addresses involved is never generated. But the messages are still stored on a cloud server that can be called by government investigators, and since several people have the password for the account, several people also have the possibility of leaking the contents of the messages. So it’s not a sure-fire way to keep your correspondence secret – again, just ask Paul Manafort – but it can still be a clever way to pass secret notes and feel as tricky as you used to throwing paper notes through the vents. on your device. friends’ lockers back in high school.
You don’t need another email account to do this either. Here are some of the best ideas for “folders” using other apps and services.
Share a note in Notes
The Apple Notes app is more than just a screenshot of a celebrity apology; it also allows you to share notes with friends to work on together. Your group can keep a long-term note that will update on each of your Apple devices when someone saves it, but is never actually emailed. Better yet, if everyone is already using Notes, you don’t need to share the password, just give everyone access to the same note.
Use a cloud-based note-taking service like Simplenote
Simplenote is free, easy to use, and cross-platform. If you and your friend are using a Simplenote account, you can leave any number of notes that are synced to the Simplenote cloud server. Just keep in mind that anyone with a password will be able to see all of your notes, so don’t use the same account for everything that is just for your eyes. Evernote might work too, but the free basic account only syncs with two devices.
Share Dropbox folder
If you and your friend use Dropbox , you can leave notes for each other in a shared folder, and any changes made to that folder are synced across any devices that are signed in to your Dropbox account. You also don’t need to share your Dropbox credentials with this method, which allows you to keep all other Dropbox files private – just obviously don’t put them in a shared folder. What’s more, you can password protect files before uploading them to a shared folder for an extra layer of security.
Use a to-do list app
If the messages you want to share are relatively short, you can try a task management app. You and your friend can select an app like Any.Do and either share an account or just share a to-do list. Add new messages to the to-do list, and your friend can mark them as fully as he reads.
Leave voice notes for each other
Many voice recording apps like RecUp for iOS or VoiceDrop for Android let you save voice memos to Dropbox. You can create a new Dropbox account and share credentials (the free Dropbox Basic account has 2GB of storage), but you probably don’t have to. First, install the app on your phone, connect it to Dropbox and select a folder to store your recordings. Then, in the Dropbox app, share that same folder with your friend. Then, when your friend sets up the same voice memo app, they can connect their own Dropbox and save the recordings in the same shared folder.