WhatsApp in India – Schneier on Security

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WhatsApp in India
Meta has threatened to pull WhatsApp out of India if the courts try to force it to break its end-to-end encryption.

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Clive Robinson


April 30, 2024 10:05 AM

@ ALL,

The practical solutions to the “End To End Encryption”(E2EE) have been known for a very long time. Claude Shannon gave if a fundamental mathematical proof back getting on for a century ago in the early 1940’s if not earlier.

But we need to remember E2EE is just a tiny part of the privacy problem.

To understand why you have to understand the fundamental problem of privacy is that if you want it you have to “pay in some way” by thought and effort, which most are unwilling to do.

Thus those that do become a very clear visible signal well above the well trimmed grass unless they go to considerably extra effort. So the price of privacy rises yet further. The same goes for other issues to do with the ends of the communications channel which gives rise to “traffic analysis” and other higher level attacks against privacy and the attendant costs of keeping it[1].

Now consider who this cost rise benefits and who it harms… Worse how it’s enabled both technologically and sociologically.

All for the sake of apparant convenience… Thus an “easy life” has become in effect an “Orwellian life”.

As for,

“Smart criminals will just move to other services”

Will they?

I actually doubt it, and history in recent times shows the opposite as far as,

“The convenience of electronic communications”

The technology makes the cost of mass surveillance ever cheaper for those that profit by it. And society insists that you must be part of the mass surveilled at your own expense or be an outcast.

The thing is that few even who read this blog, realise that we are,

“Sleep walking into a trap of our own making.”

Like lambs to the slaughter…

Thus the question is what are “we” –the harmed– going to do against those harming us?

[1] I’ve mentioned many times over the years what you need to consider as part of a workable privacy strategy. It’s not just a lot of hard work, it’s also very fragile, and unlike many years ago nothing on “approved channels” is ephemeral any more. This “record it all” policy I’ve likened to those who surveil attempting to build a “Time Machine” so that they can take information and methods from now and apply it to what happened in the long past to punish those that have become inconvenient tomorrow.

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.

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