[dead]
Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group
61–70 of 206 posts
Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group
#62These ME countries are authoritarian hellholes with a thin veneer of civility and modernity. Think I'm exaggerating? How about being randomly dragged off your flight to have your vagina inspected: https://www.arabnews.jp/en/middle-east/article_30004/
Being thrown in jail arbitrarily without much recourse is such a common occurrence it's spawned its won business category: https://www.detainedindubai.org/
I personally would not step foot in any of these places. This article is not news, it's par for the course.
Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group
#63Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> They didn't actually crack WhatsApp traffic. Someone in the group probably just reported it. So you don’t know any of this? You have no proof someone in the group reported it. You have no proof they weren’t using a backdoor they found with or without Meta knowing this… You’re just here to defend Meta then?
It’s just Occam’s razor chip out
Way easier for one of a group of humans to report than for a conspiracy hack
Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group
#65> The UAE government owns majority holdings in telecom companies Etisalat and Du. This gives security services the power to observe all communications on their networks.
> The Arab state has also used the Israeli-developed software Pegasus which allows agents to listen into private calls and read messages, even if they are shared on encrypted apps like WhatsApp,.
This seems to be the key part from a tech standpoint. Notice that it doesn't come out and say whether Pegasus played a part in this particular arrest, or the telecoms, or both, but it seems to be implied.
Also, I'm intrigued by the punctuation error at the end: "...like WhatsApp,." Did an earlier draft go on to list others? Does Pegasus help governments read messages from Telegram? Signal? It would be interesting to know more.
Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group
#66> 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…
These days when you hear "most of the world.." used as a kind of indirect appeal to common-sense legislation, you just gotta wonder what or who they are talking about anymore.
Its a strange beautiful notion though. That there is some grand consesus out there somewhere, in The-most-of-the-world, where laws are just and rational, where states-of-exception only exist in the kitchens and the classrooms. I just know one day the barrelman will cry out, and we will know we have reached the-most-the-world.
Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group
#67> 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
In peacetime, definitely. In war time, there's a necessary balance to be found between “information as public interest” and “providing free battle damage assessment” to an adversary.
I'm not saying I'm in favor of jailing people for pictures, but we cannot ignore the importance of intelligence in modern combat with ubiquitous precision weapons.
People have similarly been arrested for filming air defense at work in Ukraine, and again it makes sense because giving away key sensitive information for social network cred isn't something you want in a country suffering from a military aggression.
Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Ukraine does it to avoid assisting Russian damage assessment and targeting efforts. Avoiding embarrassment is not really part of the equation, especially when they need to push for more international support.
> Ukraine does it to avoid assisting Russian damage assessment and targeting efforts.
Isn’t UAE doing this to avoid Iranian damage assessment and targeting efforts also?
Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> They didn't actually crack WhatsApp traffic. Someone in the group probably just reported it. So you don’t know any of this? You have no proof someone in the group reported it. You have no proof they weren’t using a backdoor they found with or without Meta knowing this… You’re just here to defend Meta then?
The poster is right, it's very unlikely that WA has been backdoored/cracked, and it seems obvious why.
A backdoor to the world's largest messaging app would be extremely valuable: while it can exist, it's unlikely that it'd be so widely available the UAE police can use it for such insignificant cases. And because of its value, no one with access to it (the US, the UAE, Meta) would want it to become public knowledge through such an insignificant case, because everyone they really want to spy on would switch to Signal in a second.
Re: Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group
#70What people do not know or understand about the Arabian Peninsula is that you have essentially zero rights. People think, "It cannot be that bad" because a lot of money is spent on good PR for the region, and also because they never find themselves in situations where they get to see how little their lives are worth in those places. You go to a hotel for a week or take a business trip, everyone smiles, the food is go…
> "Well, yeah, if you do something egregious...", nope.
Leaving a bad review online for a local business can get you arrested and jailed.