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Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

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Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#491
post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty well? People make small rockets as a hobby all the time. The barrier to entry to cryptography is many times lower too.

>Pretty well? People make small rockets as a hobby all the time. That's pretty far detached from real rocketry. A similar metaphor for computing would be the allowed use of a LeapFrog system, rather than a computer. 'My cryptography hobby is going pretty well, I just practiced a Caesar cipher on my LeapFrog.' (neither a LeapFrog or a model rocket being a practical equivalent to their big relative.)

But if you want to communicate with somebody else in an encrypted way, then you can likely do so with effort that doesn't even approach a hobby. Setting up a system requires more effort, but these singular cases are hard enough to detect and crack that the law enforcement agencies would never be able to do it. You might not even need encryption, because you could communicate in ways that are just obfuscated enough that nobody's going to check. Eg write with blocks on the ground in Minecraft or something.

If the goal is to catch malicious people that are trying to hide their communications, then outlawing encryption won't work. But it will give the government a good excuse to spy on people.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#492
post #202
post #198

Does anyone have any advice for what platform might be best to migrate to? I'm not overly concerned with group E2E, but it is a nice-to-have. Telegram and Discord seem like two of the most practical options, Keybase and Matrix seem like two of the most ideal from a security standpoint. I wonder what offers the best cross-section of features and user experience.

Matrix or Signal?

For the interested, matrix project lead answered many questions regarding security and encryption in yesterday's AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/da219t/im_project_...

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's possible enough to tear through our binaries No, it's not "possible enough" and I strongly suspect you fully realize that. A backdoor doesn't need to be in a form of an IF statement or something comparably obvious and silly. It can be a weakly seeded PRNG that would allow a "determined party" to brute-force the key exchange in a reasonable time. That would take man-years to fish out from a binary, and that's w…

I disagree that it would take man-years to fish that out from a binary. Black hat and white hat hackers do this all the time.

I agree. The crypto used is industry standard, and the actual process all the way from random number generation to deriving a key is relatively easy to follow.

Active ways to attack the client to make it leak the key are far more worrying - but even an open source project wouldn't protect against that.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#494

If the source code isn't available for audit by 3rd parties (or yourself), and you can't build it from source, then it was never really "secure" anyway. What lawmakers do or don't say is just noise. Platforms that rely on trust (in this case, trusting that FB isn't doing bad things) provide very weak guarantees about privacy/security. They could easily include a keylogger in WhatsApp and bypass the e2e encryption, fo…

The Whatsapp binary is sufficiently transparent to enable someone determined to write their own client. Thats enough info for an expert to verify their "messages are end to end encrypted and we don't know the key" claim. The fly in the ointment is the client might have additional functionality to leak the e2e encryption key. That is far harder to find, but if it's use were widespread, it would be found by researchers…

Having a 'secure' conversation definitely implies trust in Google/Apple, regardless of the Whatsapp binary behaving flawlessly (e2e encryption, solid PRNG, no logs etc.)

They could indeed serve you a different binary from the app-store. "Do you think that's Whatsapp you're using?"

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#495
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The keeping safe argument from government is indeed preposterous. As if that was their mission to keep us safe. Why are they allowing our nature to be destroyed in favor of money/economy? This years heatwaves killed many thousands of people in Europe only, some estimates are in the tens of thousands. This is real deaths in 1 year, not because of terrorist attacks, no fucking backdoor will stop this. And what are they…

Was the Europe heatwave in 2019 caused by government actions?

Rather, it was contributed to by government inaction.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#496

Yes, this is something that literally everyone who reads HN will oppose. Meanwhile do you hear the deafening silence from the average Joe who thinks he has "nothing to hide"? Don't hate the politicians who keep pushing this. They're just trying not to get fired. And the surest way to get fired in a western country right now is to be seen doing nothing about the terrorism problem and then having terrorist acts committ…

But by your very comment, it only makes sense to hate the politicians! If all they care about is that they keep their jobs, then isn't trying to get the politicians fired for threatening our privacy the best way to get them to care about our privacy?

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#497
US Citizens don't need to worry. All of your private information will be turned over to the NSA / US Gov. If the US wants a US citizens private info, they just request it of the UK's intel services. The UK Intel services get it from Facebook, and they then hand it to the US Gov. For your convenience.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#498
post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you saying the backdoors will or won't be introduced to WhatsApp?

Will not. We are completely opposed to this. Backdoors are a horrible idea and any government who suggests them is proposing weakening the security and privacy of everyone.

Will you pull out of UK and US? Seems very unrealistic. You have no choice but to obey the law,even if the law is ridiculous.

Have you considered architectural changes that will allow for the app to be compiled and deployed by an affiliate corp outside of these jurisdictions?

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not possible in the US unless the Supreme Court stops giving a crap about the first amendment. Incredibly unlikely no matter how unpopular free speech might become.

Oh, as well as the Clipper debacle, in the 90s I seem to recall there was a big push towards forced key escrow, on both sides of the pond.

The US government gave up the Clipper chip laws before even trying to take it to the Supreme Court as it was such an obvious loser.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not possible in the US unless the Supreme Court stops giving a crap about the first amendment. Incredibly unlikely no matter how unpopular free speech might become.

If congress and the president decide they want to increase the SC to 99 justices and add and additional 90 of their choosing then that's when the US Constitution officially dies but it can be done according to the law.

The attack on the legitimacy of the courts will fail this time around, just as it always has. The justices rule mostly with integrity and they’re mostly respected and protected.
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