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Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

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Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#181

Post by cibyr »

beejiu wrote: post #136
rdrd wrote: post #7

I find the wordsmithery on Meta's statement the most interesting: “We do not track your *PRECISE* location, we don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging and we do not track the *PERSONAL* messages people are sending one another," it added. “We do not provide *BULK* information to any government.”

Re: "we don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging" From https://faq.whatsapp.com/444002211197967/?locale=en_US : > In the ordinary course of providing our service, WhatsApp does not store messages once they are delivered or transaction logs of such delivered messages. Undelivered messages are deleted from our servers after 30 days. As stated in the WhatsApp Privacy Policy, we may collect, use, preserve, and share…

I think rdrd just missed that piece of the fine wordsmithing - so long as there's at least one person not included in that "some users", then "we don’t keep logs of who EVERYONE is messaging" is still true.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#182

Post by Cyph0n »

lurk2 wrote: post #172
perihelions wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta can also just lie about it. If they were secretly granting backdoor root access to some NSA spooks, like Microsoft did with PRISM or AT&T did with 641A, most likely no one would find out, so, there'd be zero actual downside to simply lying.

> like Microsoft did with PRISM or AT&T did with 641A, most likely no one would find out People did find out.

Only because a select few people had the balls to blow the whistle.

Imagine if Snowden decided to just do his work and move on? How much longer would it have taken for these facts to be revealed to the public?

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#183

Post by alephnerd »

mandevil wrote: post #119
nine_k wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that the population of Iran is not being bombed, except a few high-ranking military personnel. It's the nuclear facilities, air defense sites, and some electrical power facilities that have been bombed. A number of meetings / manifestations of expatriate Iranians happened around the world, supporting the Israeli actions. The current regime earned no love from most of the population, it seems; massive ant…

Governments do fall to internal revolt/collapse regularly. I mean, Iran has done so within the memory of most of its senior leadership! They understand this much better than I do- Khamenei himself played a major role in toppling the Shah. Just generally that doesn't happen while being attacked by other countries air-power, which as a general rule makes populations support their governments rather than start marching…

I tend to disagree. Iran was already on the verge of a succession crisis, as Khamenei only rose to power by viciously putting down Khomeini's allies after his passing, and the inter-service rivalry between the Army (leaning towards reformers like Khomeini's grandson), IRGC (autonomous), and the Basij (lead by Khamenei's son). This is the forcing function.

Iran had a very violent succession crisis in the late 80s-early 90s, but the titans of the revolution and rallying behind the flag due to the Iran-Iraq war helped ensure some base amount of unity.

There is a vacuum in Iran's elite, as most of the upper and mid-level echelons are those who solidified their fiefdoms in the 1990s.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#184

Post by selcuka »

luis8 wrote: post #133
mgraczyk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they are legally required to do this in most places

I don't know why you are being downvoted. https://transparency.meta.com/reports/government-data-reques... They can't see your messages but then can give ips or accounts that can be inferred to be related given the info meta has access to

Also take the "can't see your messages" statement with a grain of salt. Like the famous Lotus Notes backdoor [1] they might have given the government an easy(ier) way to decrypt those messages.

The backdoor in Lotus Notes (differential cryptography) wasn't a secret. It was public information. Ray Ozzie used it as a way to circumvent US encryption export laws. Today companies have to be more discrete.

[1] http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#185

Post by JumpCrisscross »

krisoft wrote: post #179
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you see an out for Khamenei et al ? They can’t credibly dismantle their nuclear deterrent and expect to keep their heads. Israel and America cannot accept it, particularly now that its conventional defences have been shown ineffective. The classic approach, airlifting the Ayatollah to a dacha in Moscow while the IRGC saves face and plots a forever path to new elections, falls apart when you consider how Iran’s int…

> They can’t credibly dismantle their nuclear deterrent Mainly because they don’t have one and never had one. Hard to dismantle something you don’t have. Even harder to do so credibly. They had programs to obtain a nuclear deterrent. They can dismantle those programs. But they never had the actual nuclear deterrent itself.

Sure, I mean that Khamenei can’t come out and say he’s shutting down enrichment, letting in the IAEA, actually do it and expect to stay in charge.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#186

Post by ajross »

MitPitt wrote: post #177
ajross wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does it matter if the messages are e2e encrypted if the messages are managed on the two ends of the channel by a closed source binary that does who-knows-what. Would you prefer your dissident messages be read by Meta Corporation or the Islamic Republic of Iran? That's the difference. No, there's no technical difference in the sense that neither solution can be verified to be probably secure vs. third party insp…

> read by Meta Corporation or Neither please! Corpos can obviously sell out or be pressured into giving out info to all sorts of agencies

That's not responsive, though. The point is there are actual human beings in a war zone under a repressive regime making decisions about software. And they aren't interested in your abstract idea about "corpos" being "pressured". They want not to be snatched by the secret police. Please.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#187

Post by alephnerd »

Buttons840 wrote: post #60
gspencley wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are we toppling all these foreign governments I don't want to speak to the other foreign governments, and I think there is a LOT of room for healthy criticism of how the USA handles its foreign policy, past & present. But to answer the question directly with respects to Iran, specifically: the leadership has been repeatedly chanting "Death To America" for its 45 year history and have been actively trying to dev…

> have been actively trying to develop a nuclear weapon program The US Director of National Intelligence testified to congress a few weeks ago that no US intelligence agency believes that Iran is developing a nuclear bomb, and that they believed Iran was at least 3 years away from having the ability to build a nuclear bomb even if they tried. What you are saying directly contradicts what US intelligence agencies have…

> US Director of National Intelligence

The US Director of National Intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard) has a very public history of backing Assad and Iran during the Syrian Civil War, and any mention of the DNI without mentioning it's currently Tulsi Gabbard is clearly a bad faith discussion.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#188

Post by rKarpinski »

Aloisius wrote: post #120
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re being dramatic. We installed the Shah [EDIT: as an autocrat] with the ‘53 coup [1]. That was our original sin. But the Islamic Republic wasn’t an American creation. Neither was Saddam’s Iraq or the Mujahideen or Al Qaeda. We variously facilitated, opposed and ignored these elements, mostly the last. Ignoring the Soviet history in the region, together with the fact that Iranians aren’t automatons, but human be…

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi became Shah of the Imperial State of Iran in 1941, succeeding his father after the British forced him out. I'm unsure as to how the US installed him in 1953. He had been Shah for 11 years.

-> I'm unsure as to how the US installed him in 1953. He had been Shah for 11 years.

Operation Ajax

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#189

Post by Buttons840 »

alephnerd wrote: post #187
Buttons840 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> have been actively trying to develop a nuclear weapon program The US Director of National Intelligence testified to congress a few weeks ago that no US intelligence agency believes that Iran is developing a nuclear bomb, and that they believed Iran was at least 3 years away from having the ability to build a nuclear bomb even if they tried. What you are saying directly contradicts what US intelligence agencies have…

> US Director of National Intelligence The US Director of National Intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard) has a very public history of backing Assad and Iran during the Syrian Civil War, and any mention of the DNI without mentioning it's currently Tulsi Gabbard is clearly a bad faith discussion.

Is there a better representative of the US intelligence agencies than the Director of National Intelligence? Maybe a true Scotsman?

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#190

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dragonwriter wrote: post #174
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re being dramatic. We installed the Shah [EDIT: as an autocrat] with the ‘53 coup [1]. That was our original sin. But the Islamic Republic wasn’t an American creation. Neither was Saddam’s Iraq or the Mujahideen or Al Qaeda. We variously facilitated, opposed and ignored these elements, mostly the last. Ignoring the Soviet history in the region, together with the fact that Iranians aren’t automatons, but human be…

> But the Islamic Republic wasn’t an American creation. Neither was Saddam’s Iraq Saddam's Iraq was, though; Saddam's rise to power in Iraq was backed actively by the US because he was seen as a useful anti-Communist, and once in power he was backed by the US government (to the point of rushing Donald Rumsfeld out as Reagan's special envoy to assure both Saddam and the world of our support for him after he used chemi…

Backed actively, not caused by [1]. (And then promptly abandoned by Johnson.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/17_July_Revolution

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