WhatsApp accused of giving terrorists 'a secret place to hide' | Hacker News Reader

WhatsApp accused of giving terrorists 'a secret place to hide'

telegraph.co.uk

17 pointsvixen9911 comments

Active discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13959953

I don't understand this, isn't WhatsApp end to end encrypted? How can they even have messages to hand over? Am I missing something?

Arguing that someone should give you something is much easier to communicate than arguing that someone should redo its tech to be able to give you something.

Policywise it is beneficial to conceal your own knowledge about their technical barrier and frame it in the easiest way possible to produce the highest public pressure.

Which is probably what this telegraph journalist did fall for.

Yeah, the title here should be changed. The Home Secretary is actually arguing that end-to-end encryption should not be permitted. From the article:

"Referring to Whatsapp's system of end-to-end encryption, she said: 'It is completely unacceptable. There should be no place for terrorists to hide.'"

The article's headline is "WhatsApp accused of giving terrorists 'a secret place to hide' as it refuses to hand over London attacker's messages." That's misleading/inaccurate to begin with. But the way it's been shortened here just makes it completely inaccurate.

I see, so the politician there seems to imply that there should be no end to end encryption, which is even worse.

WhatsApp will not hand anything over because they can't. This article fails to investigate and explain the reasons why, rather casts fear and hate on the reader by making US tech companies look and sound unreasonable.

The article literally states:

End to end encryption is a way of transmitting a message so that it can only be read by the intended recipient, and not intercepted by accessing the servers or the networks via which the message is sent.

Rather than being sent as plain text, the message is scrambled as a long series of digits that needs a key only held by the sender and the recipient to understand it.

The keys are ephemeral, meaning they disappear after the message is unscrambled so that it can not be unlocked afterwards.

This is rather short-sighted. The intelligence community is accusing WhatsApp and other apps that provide end-to-end encryption of providing a "place to hide" for terrorist. But what's stopping a terrorist from writing a letter in some kind of code, or develop their own encryption? Who knows, maybe they are already doing this.

Banning end-to-end encryption would be a completely ineffective measure.

(To make it clear, I'm not supporting banning end-to-end encryption in any way.)

Writing a letter in some kind of code is not suitable for coordinating an operation.

The intelligence community is absolutely right that WhatsApp (and likes) provide a "place to hide" for terrorists. The thing is, however, that they provide "a place to hide" for all of us. Hiding terrorists is collateral damage.

Banning end-to-end encryption will be very effective in creating a black/gray market of end-to-end encryption apps.

Even if there was legislation to force companies to give intelligence agencies backdoors to encrypted communication channels, what is stopping terrorist networks from building their own apps? What would stop people from distributing their own apps that don't comply with the law? Lock down all hardware?

Amber Rudd the UK's Home Secretary was on the BBC today requesting a backdoor be placed into Whatsapp so they can access messages in an event like this.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39396578

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