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Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

lbc.co.uk

11–20 of 206 posts

Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

#11
> Radha Stirling, chief executive of London-based advocacy group Detained in Dubai, said Dubai police had "explicitly confirmed they are conducting electronic surveillance operations capable of detecting private WhatsApp messages."

Whoa.

Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

#12
post #2

Anything Meta should be binned if you care about yourself.

They didn't actually crack WhatsApp traffic. Someone in the group probably just reported it.

WhatsApp's insecurities are that Meta has access to a full network graph of all users' contacts, and that it wants to upload an unencrypted backup to Google or Apple by default. If there was an actual backdoor in the closed-source crypto, I highly doubt they'd give Dubai police access to it.

Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

#13
> Radha Stirling, chief executive of London-based advocacy group Detained in Dubai, said Dubai police had "explicitly confirmed they are conducting electronic surveillance operations capable of detecting private WhatsApp messages."

And later it mentions that they "also" use the Pegasus spyware. Although I'm not sure I'd trust that as actual confirmation that this was a separate attack vector. Even if "someone in the chat leaked it" is AIUI the most common way something like this would happen.

Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

#15
Not like I like the UAE (I don't), but during this war they made it plenty clear that it is illegal to record and share any videos or pictures of the damage that was caused by the Iranian attacks. Everyone in the country knows this, and I'm sure airlines have procedures to familiarize staff with the laws of the country they're flying to. If they don't, still not the UAE's problem. Don't like the law? Go somewhere else.

(inb4 any arm chair analyst decides this law is a bad law. That's not the point. The police only apply the law and not write it)

Secondly, I doubt this was some sort of high tech operation. More likely someone just snitched and/or some sort of meta data snooping.

Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

#18

> publishing information deemed harmful to state interests Is the charge, which I think kind of speaks for itself. Full on: "You embarrassed us, straight to jail." In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest and shared by the media then we'd reflect on if our routing is safe/correct and make proportional changes for safety. Not a big deal, nobody is fired, life moves on. I feel like actions li…

[flagged]

I'm not American. America didn't even exist when most of the core social concepts I referenced were popularized, and it certainly wasn't in the 20th century.

Also, very self-telling, that I said "UAE should do better for UAE's own future sake" to which you responded: "you want to take away UAE's sovereignty!" Hmm, very odd, that.

Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

#19

> publishing information deemed harmful to state interests Is the charge, which I think kind of speaks for itself. Full on: "You embarrassed us, straight to jail." In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest and shared by the media then we'd reflect on if our routing is safe/correct and make proportional changes for safety. Not a big deal, nobody is fired, life moves on. I feel like actions li…

> In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest

You'd absolutely get detained by authorities in Ukraine or Russia for sharing consequences of airstrikes on critical infrastructure. I'm sure other countries would do the same (not that it's good).

Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm not American. America didn't even exist when most of the core social concepts I referenced were popularized , and it certainly wasn't in the 20th century. Also, very self-telling, that I said "UAE should do better for UAE's own future sake" to which you responded: "you want to take away UAE's sovereignty!" Hmm, very odd, that.

[flagged]
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