Maciej, I have tremendous respect for you. What follows is a long post, so please don't feel like I am beating up on you - I am responding to a few things in th

Maciej, I have tremendous respect for you. What follows is a long post, so please don't feel like I am beating up on you - I am responding to a few things in this thread. --- This wasn't negligent disinformation (post-revision of the usage of 'backdoor') on the part of the Guardian. The reaction to the information presented on the part of the public - to switch to SMS in significant numbers - was irrational. That said, there is a productive issue raised by the Guardian that has been smoked out into the open, namely the revelation of two contradictory assumptions underlying the decision, as discussed by Moxie in the previous HN thread, to defend against state level snooping. The rationale goes a bit like this: 1 - People change keys in the regular course of using Whatsapp. It therefore needs to accept that without impeding usability. 2 - Most users do not care about security enough to prefer one service to another for the Whatsapp market segment - Those users use Signal or other offerings. 3 - Whatsapp's lack of 'post consent' resending is intentional, and designed to prevent the server from knowing who is monitoring the status of their keys. 4 - As such, Whatsapp effectively defends against dragnet surveillance! As security minded individuals will note inappropriate key changes once a MITM attack begins, confer, and determine they have been compromised at scale. The key flaw here is that 2 and 3 mean that for targeted surveillance, powerful attackers are unlikely to be uncovered while exfiltrating specific communications, and likely don't see very much reputational or legal risk to potentially triggering a key change event. So people are vulnerable to feasible, targeted message exfiltration, contrary to what they may have believed when E2E was rolled out. That's newsworthy. The fact that the security community is striking back makes me feel like they are circling the wagons now that the Guardian has caught them with their pants down - They should have been the ones raising these issues and providing the appropriate framing to protect the public.