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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.?

#361

Post by fsloth »

jedberg wrote: post #197
fsloth wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless your mom is planning to involve herself in illegal activities I don't see a problem. Most electronic communication channels are compromised anyway. If you don't want eavesdroppers, don't use electronics.

> Unless your mom is planning to involve herself in illegal activities I don't see a problem. I assume you'd be happy to post all your credit card receipts and emails for all of us to see then. You're not doing anything illegal, right? That would be the only reason you don't want those things to be visible.

Sorry, I was too brief. I explained it further it in another comment. But my point was that you should presume all communications channels are transparent to nation states. I was not referring that it's okay to have a surveillance civilization. My point was that we have a surveillance civilization, and you either use the communication fabric supported or you don't.

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

#362

Post by nine_k »

scarmig wrote: post #334
jhh wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still remember how one German Islamist terror group just used their web-email provider's draft feature. They never 'sent' anything. There are often quite simple ways to circumvent this kind of thing.

The idea that using a webmail provider's draft feature provides security might have been true a long time ago--I don't know--but it's really stupid to think it does so nowadays.

It was security through obscurity. Not very reliable against an attack, but very unlikely to attract an attack.

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

#363

Post by lordnacho »

Not my area of expertise but would it not be relatively easy for someone to make their own app using open source and put it in an apk for ordinary phones?

I've messed around with the open source cryptography libs before and I don't see why someone could not do that.

There's even a fair bit of advice about how not to misuse such libs.

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

#364

Post by resters »

GordonS wrote: post #220

The idea that moves like this will "keep us safe" is utterly preposterous; there are a multitude of other ways in which terrorists (or the boogeyman de jour ) could communicate - are the UK and US governments going to insist on backdooring IRC, Slack and face-to-face conversations? Are they going to outlaw encryption libraries? I truely fear for the future that western governments, in particular the 5 eyes members, a…

> What's perhaps even more frightening is that so many people believe that moves like this are to keep us safe...

Strangely, HN is also very much in favor of the administration’s trade protectionism.

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

#365

Post by andai »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #164

I am weirdly.. giddy about this development. The more goverments try so hard to publicly force companies to, effectively, mandate backdoors, the more public will be aware of it. Added benefit is that FB will lose some market share. The sucky part is.. my mom loves Whatsapp. She was able to use it wo any issues. There are few alternatives that she was able to use so easily. All that said, I wonder. What is the breakin…

I don't know. Even among my privacy-conscious friends there's hardly any talk about this sort of thing.

Snowden was in 2013. I think all that happened is a few people were briefly horrified, but in no time it was back to business as usual.

You can even point to China as an example of how bad things can get when the state can read everything, but people just don't seem to make the connection.

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

#366

Post by jedberg »

ISL wrote: post #283
jedberg wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the courts have ruled previously that your speech is not limited just because the government has access to it. Otherwise wiretaps would be illegal already. This is just an extension of wiretap law. In both cases they need to be fought from another angle than freedom of speech, because we've already lost that battle.

If I wish to send you, jedberg, a message that looks like: C8hWgwo5YeC5ojiOaDe3JVaLev+3zaZDfRVTAjvqNCA= ("Jedberg is thoughtful.", encrypted with AES key jedberg). I must be able to do so. To compel a backdoor is to make some speech illegal.

The courts have already ruled that it’s ok to make speech illegal in the name of public safety.

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

#367

Post by srbby »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #345
jhh wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still remember how one German Islamist terror group just used their web-email provider's draft feature. They never 'sent' anything. There are often quite simple ways to circumvent this kind of thing.

People can communicate by shooting holes into CS 1.6 walls. There are literally no borders for the imaginative mind.

http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t...

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

#368

Post by ThinkBeat »

GordonS wrote: post #220

The idea that moves like this will "keep us safe" is utterly preposterous; there are a multitude of other ways in which terrorists (or the boogeyman de jour ) could communicate - are the UK and US governments going to insist on backdooring IRC, Slack and face-to-face conversations? Are they going to outlaw encryption libraries? I truely fear for the future that western governments, in particular the 5 eyes members, a…

I am about 90% certain that IRC and Slack is already well backdoored.

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

#369

Post by henryaj »

vbezhenar wrote: post #281
gsich wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signals backups are encrypted.

How are they restored? Is it password-encrypted?

Yes, you're given a random password when you enable backups that you need to use when restoring. They don't get uploaded to the cloud. On iOS there's no backup feature at all AFAIK.

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

#370

Post by oarsinsync »

spsful wrote: post #149
swatcoder wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source code availability isn’t really a solution to the trust problem. Sure, it allows for an audit, but the practical truth is that few people are qualified to perform those audits and few of them have a sufficient incentive to spend their time doing so. So you still just invest trust in the maintainer or — if you’re lucky — the third party auditing firm who was paid to review the code. That you can review the code…

I'm not sure I'd surmise the dependency of users to be an entire culture in and of itself. Plus, I feel like this splits hairs; going down the rabbit hole of "well who is checking the open source code" and "well who is checking the person checking the open source code" leads to endless complexity, especially when the move in question is more symbolic than substantive. If WhatsApp did not use e2e encryption by default…

> If WhatsApp did not use e2e encryption by default (and they didn't)

Correct use of past tense. In the present, e2e encryption is by default.

> Does this new announcement really lessen the security and privacy of the users?

Yes it does, since e2e encryption is enabled by default now. Best I can tell, there’s no way to disable it either.

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