Did I miss it or did the reporter in this article neglect to mention the parent company's Bloomberg Messaging Service?
Wall Street's WhatsApp Secret: Illegal Texting Is Out of Control
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Re: Wall Street's WhatsApp Secret: Illegal Texting Is Out of Control
#72"Wall Street's Restaurant Secret: Illegal Talking over Lunch is Out of Control" > Dirty jokes and NSFW GIFs. Snaps of unsuspecting colleagues on the trading floor. Screenshots of confidential client positions. > All that -- and, on occasion, even legally dubious information -- is increasingly being trafficked over the new private lines of Wall Street: street-level restaurants like McDonalds and Taco Bell. > “They’re…
The FBI can track who you talk to in-person, but they can not with WhatsApp at the moment. Thus WhatsApp is orders of magnitude more efficient.
I doubt that, WhatsApp was bought by facebook to datamine contact lists, I'm pretty sure the FBI can request this data.
Re: Wall Street's WhatsApp Secret: Illegal Texting Is Out of Control
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
The FBI can track who you talk to in-person, but they can not with WhatsApp at the moment. Thus WhatsApp is orders of magnitude more efficient.
I doubt that, WhatsApp was bought by facebook to datamine contact lists, I'm pretty sure the FBI can request this data.
Do you have any grounds for this statement whatsoever? Sounds a lot like baseless speculation. How would you imagine that FBI bypasses the end-to-end encryption?
Re: Wall Street's WhatsApp Secret: Illegal Texting Is Out of Control
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt that, WhatsApp was bought by facebook to datamine contact lists, I'm pretty sure the FBI can request this data.
Do you have any grounds for this statement whatsoever? Sounds a lot like baseless speculation. How would you imagine that FBI bypasses the end-to-end encryption?
The meta data of who talks to who is not encrypted.
Edit: This is the whole problem tin-foilers have with Signal being the sole operator of servers and not allowing for federation.
Re: Wall Street's WhatsApp Secret: Illegal Texting Is Out of Control
#75If your rule requires assigning a policeman to look over every person's shoulder to enforce it then you should probably reconsider it.
I agree. I'm not one to use the "disruptive" term frequently, but that's what's going on here, IMO - traders are using disruptive technology. As with mp3s, the answer (again, IMO) is not to try to prevent their use, but to adapt the business model and laws to take advantage of them. That might mean significant changes to - and upheavals in - the financial world, but the financial world has never had qualms about inflicting those on other people.
Sooner or later, people are going to be able to communicate using encrypted channels without even needing an external device, just like they're going to be able to capture stills and video without needing anything other than their eyes and implanted hardware.
Rather than trying to enforce increasingly-unenforceable rules, I think it makes more sense to think about the business (or other organization) those rules are designed to protect, and make a call on whether it's even practical or needs to be reworked - or maybe even scrapped and replaced with something else.
Re: Wall Street's WhatsApp Secret: Illegal Texting Is Out of Control
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are right that financial crimes are a big deal. However the solution to criminality is not to create a surveillance state.
I mean it's one solution. What is the solution?
Let's start with actually prosecuting those that break current laws without regarding color of skin or size of bank account.
Re: Wall Street's WhatsApp Secret: Illegal Texting Is Out of Control
#77encrypted apps dont break SEC laws, people break SEC laws
My first thought when reading the headline. It's not "illegal texting". It's the crimes they do via texting (or via any other communication medium) that are illegal. Also, I thought the government already didn't care about any of the bankers' crimes, because it never seems to prosecute them. If there are banking crimes committed out there, I'm sure the NSA (and now 16 other agencies [1]) are aware of them, even going…
Bingo on the selective prosecution point.
Re: Wall Street's WhatsApp Secret: Illegal Texting Is Out of Control
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh c'mon. Encrypted messaging apps are orders of magnitude more efficient and discreet for communication in the context of the overall finance industry, compared to "talking over lunch" (or any other meatspace location). Not sure I have any well formulated thoughts about the significance of this trend among finance types... but I don't think your analogy is terribly illuminating.
> Encrypted messaging apps are orders of magnitude more efficient and discreet What's more discreet than a quiet conversation that you can deny happened later? You can take screenshots of just about any digital communication. The rest you can take photos of with your smart phone. I'll grant you efficiency, though, especially if it's a group conversation and some amount of coordinated activity is involved.
In-person meetings are far more conspicuous. Other people, security cameras, etc.
Re: Wall Street's WhatsApp Secret: Illegal Texting Is Out of Control
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you honestly think that's a feasible solution? Who in their right mind would work for a company that doesn't allow them to bring their personal phone to work? Unless it were required by law, no company would do that to their white collar employees -- they'd all leave for a company that doesn't treat them like eight year olds. (I feel like this would never be suggested on HN if we were discussing software companies…
Mobile phones are banned on trading floors. It is just hard to enforce for the reasons you mention.
It's kinda a soft ban though, and hard for any MD to enforce when they're the most guilty of it.
Re: Wall Street's WhatsApp Secret: Illegal Texting Is Out of Control
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt that, WhatsApp was bought by facebook to datamine contact lists, I'm pretty sure the FBI can request this data.
Do you have any grounds for this statement whatsoever? Sounds a lot like baseless speculation. How would you imagine that FBI bypasses the end-to-end encryption?
plain old fashioned MITM with a court order accompanied by a gag order should be sufficient.
Remember WhatsApp is BOTH the PKI infrastructure and the and the message transmitter. It is trivial for them to MITM by sending you and the recipient a different public key that they control and intermediate.
The encryption prevents OTHERS from snooping on you. It doesn't protect you from WhatsApp itself - or the government acting with a warrant.