US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private • Hacker News Board

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#71

Post by xvector » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 4:12 PM UTC

jijji wrote: post #47

if anybody believes that Facebook would allow people to send a totally encrypted message to somebody, they're out of their mind. they're pretty much in bed with law enforcement at this point. I mean I don't know how many people have been killed in Saudi Arabia this year for writing Facebook messages to each other that were against what the government wanted but it's probably a large number.

This reads like another low effort conspiratorial comment.

WhatsApp has been reverse engineered extensively, they worked with Moxie's team to implement the same protocol as Signal, and you can freely inspect the client binaries yourself!

If you're confident this is the case, you should provide a comment with actual technical substance backing your claims.

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#72

Post by nindalf » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 4:13 PM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #63

Ms-J wrote: post #5

Who do they expect to fall for the claims that a Facebook owned messenger couldn't read your "encrypted" messages? It's truly funny. Any large scale provider with headquarters in the USA will be subject to backdoors and information sharing with the government when they want to read or know what you are doing.

Me? I'd be very surprised if they can actually read encrypted messages (without pushing a malicious client update). The odds that no one at Meta would blow the whistle seem low, and a backdoor would likely be discovered by independent security researchers.

I'd be surprised as well. I know people who've worked on the WhatsApp apps specifically for years. It feels highly unlikely that they wouldn't have come across this backdoor and they wouldn't have mentioned it to me.

Happy to bet $100 that this lawsuit goes nowhere.

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#73

Post by Retr0id » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

Retr0id wrote: post #67

londons_explore wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't really see how it's possible to mitigate client compromise. Think of the way DRM'ed video is played. If the media player application is compromised, the video data is still secure. Thats because the GPU does both the decryption and rendering, and will not let the application read it back.

Video decryption+decoding is a well-defined enough problem that you can ship silicon that does it. You can't do the same thing for the UI of a social media app. You could put the entire app within TrustZone, but then you're not trusting the app vendor any less than you were before.

Although now I think about it more, you could have APIs for "decrypt this [text/image] with key $id, and render it as a secure overlay at coordinates ($x, $y)"

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#74

Post by Ms-J » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

j45 wrote: post #53

Aurornis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any large scale provider with headquarters in the USA will be subject to backdoors and information sharing with the government when they want to read or know what you are doing. Not just the USA. This is basically universal.

It's not guaranteed or by default. This type of generalized defeatism does more harm than not.

This is correct. Yes, every government has the ability to use violence and coerce, but that takes coordination among other things. There are still places, and areas within those places, where enforcement and the ability to keep it secret is almost not possible.

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#75

Post by preisschild » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

miohtama wrote: post #26

Both things cannot be true at the same time - WhatsApp encryption is broken - EU's and UK's Chat Control spooks demand Meta to insert backdoor because they cannot break the encryption The Guardian has its own editorial flavour on tech news, so expect them to use any excuse to bash the subject.

> EU's and UK's Chat Control spooks demand Meta to insert backdoor because they cannot break the encryption

Those are not law, so no the EU doesnt demand that

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#76

Post by mattmaroon » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 4:17 PM UTC

hsuduebc2 wrote: post #37

mattmaroon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will be step 1. Fear of being caught lying to the government is such that that is usually enough. Presumably at least a handful of people would have to know about it, and nobody likes their job at Facebook enough to go to jail over it. But you never know.

Companies lie to governments and the public all the time. I doubt that even if something were found and the case were lost, it would lead to prison or any truly severe punishment. No money was stolen and no lives were put at risk. At worst, it would likely end in a fine, and then it would be forgotten, especially given Meta’s repeated violations of user trust. The reality is that most users do not seem to care. For m…

Martha Stewart went to jail for lying to the government. The fact that there would be no punishment is why they would tell the truth.

The government is pretty harsh when they find out you lied under oath. Corporate officers do not lie to the government frequently.

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#77

Post by nindalf » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 4:19 PM UTC

This reads like a nothingburger. Couple of quotes from the article:

> the idea that WhatsApp can selectively and retroactively access the content of [end-to-end encrypted] individual chats is a mathematical impossibility

> Steven Murdoch, professor of security engineering at UCL, said the lawsuit was “a bit strange”. “It seems to be going mostly on whistleblowers, and we don’t know much about them or their credibility,” he said. “I would be very surprised if what they are claiming is actually true.”

No one apart from the firm filing the lawsuit is actually supporting this claim. A lot of people in this thread seem very confident that it's true, and I'm not sure what precisely makes them so confident.

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#78

Post by guerrilla » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 4:19 PM UTC

cosmicgadget wrote: post #32

> “We look forward to moving forward with those claims and note WhatsApp’s denials have all been carefully worded in a way that stops short of denying the central allegation in the complaint – that Meta has the ability to read WhatsApp messages, regardless of its claims about end-to-end encryption.” My money is on the chats being end to end encrypted and separately uploaded to Facebook.

> My money is on the chats being end to end encrypted and separately uploaded to Facebook.

This is what I've suspected for a long time. I bet that's it. They can already read both ends, no need to b0rk the encryption. It's just them doing their job to protect you from fourth parties, not from themselves.

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#79

Post by varenc » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 4:19 PM UTC

cosmicgadget wrote: post #32

> “We look forward to moving forward with those claims and note WhatsApp’s denials have all been carefully worded in a way that stops short of denying the central allegation in the complaint – that Meta has the ability to read WhatsApp messages, regardless of its claims about end-to-end encryption.” My money is on the chats being end to end encrypted and separately uploaded to Facebook.

If this was happening en-masse, wouldn't this be discovered by the many people reverse engineering WhatsApp? Reverse engineering is hard sophisticated work, but given how popular WhatsApp is plenty of independent security researchers are doing it. I'm quite skeptical Meta could hide some malicious code in WhatsApp that's breaking the E2EE without it being discovered.

Re: US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

#80

Post by gruez » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 4:20 PM UTC

huijzer wrote: post #38

Ms-J wrote: post #5

Who do they expect to fall for the claims that a Facebook owned messenger couldn't read your "encrypted" messages? It's truly funny. Any large scale provider with headquarters in the USA will be subject to backdoors and information sharing with the government when they want to read or know what you are doing.

I have reached the point that I think even the chat control discussion might be a distraction because essentially they can already get anything. Yeah government needs to fill in a form to request, but that’s mostly automated I believe

>I have reached the point that I think even the chat control discussion might be a distraction because essentially they can already get anything.

Then why are politicians wasting time and attracting ire attempting pushing it through? Same goes for UK demanding backdoors. If they already have it, why start a big public fight over it?