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UK government calls out Whatsapp for enabling criminals to communicate in secret
- b5 9y agoThey've done these things before WhatsApp and will continue to do it no matter what changes are made to the law. As long as there are bad people, they'll find a way. This is just another, hard-to-criticise vector to undermine privacy for the vast majority of people who are not criminals.
- jchw 9y agoThere's a scary, completely secret communication method that bypasses almost all law enforcement surveillance technology we have, and worse, it's existed for a long time and is already in common use with pedophiles and terrorists alike. It's called "talking to somebody behind closed doors."
- egeozcan 9y agoLuckily, we have Internet of Things to remedy that unacceptable situation. With the advances of machine learning, we won't even need that. We will be able to tell if you are a criminal from the way you walk on the street which are full of surveillance cameras.
- theyregreat 9y agoAlexa is a stool pigeon.
- romanovcode 9y agoNot to mention cool new phones from Google with always-on microphones!
- adrianN 9y agoEvery phone (even dumbphones!) is a phone with an always-on microphone.
- jjawssd 9y agoThe "Information Awareness Office" already has a program "Human Identification at a Distance (HumanID)" with this capability
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI wonder when some country will try to implement the idea from Jacek Dukaj's "Black Oceans" - a society in which you can have private space, but if you've disabled cameras and/or are out of their view and anything happens you you, you don't get insurance.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- harryf 9y agoIt doesn't scale very well though when you're trying to run a large criminal organisation
- mtgx 9y agoThey along with the tech industry are quickly ending that option, too, to the point where as soon as it happens, they'll act as if it's criminal to try to hide what you're talking behind closed doors.
- jstanley 9y agoWhy aren't they also calling out ISPs, computer manufacturers, and the national grid for enabling criminals to communicate in secret? If we want to stop criminals from being able to access neutral services, surely we should be starting with running water, supermarkets, restaurants, and anyone else who supplies food or drink. That would put a stop to the problem much more quickly.
- akuji1993 9y agoAlso every other communication service. It's ridiculous how they are singling out Facebook for this. Why not the others that specifically tell their users that their conversations are not saved or searched through in any way (see Telegram and others).
- stevekemp 9y agoThe national grid? You think the electricity suppliers should, somehow, stop "terrorists" from using electricity to make toast?
- falcolas 9y agoYes! Down with Terrorist Toast slathered in pedophile peanut butter! The true menace to society!
- Tepix 9y agoPedophiles, criminals and of course terrorists! If we can't read everything, encryption must be outlawed! /s
- chillydawg 9y agoTo be fair, whatsapp makes it super easy - far easier than it's ever really been - to communicate so easily and securely with so many people. It's never black and white - you cant ban crypto and you also cant give criminals carte blanche for uncrackable crypto. The middle ground is the very difficult thing.
- Tepix 9y agoWhatsapp, Signal et al. make it easy for everyone to use end-to-end encryption. Not just for criminals. Why should only criminals be entitled to privacy?
- StavrosK 9y agoI mean, the argument is "only non-criminals should be entitled to privacy". The problem is that, if you knew who the criminals were, you could just lock them up and be done with it, so all the governments err on the side of "nobody should have privacy, just in case they're a criminal". Everyone here wants "everyone should have privacy, and if criminals get it too, then so be it; after all, criminals could get privacy some other way anyway".
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoI really don't care if the contents of my Whatsapp/Messenger/SMS/etc. comments/posts are made public, FWIW. Nor do I mind that GCHQ can probably listen to all my calls and certainly not that they use meta-data to look for links with organised crime (eg terrorism). My impression would be that in the UK outside of fora like HN that position would be pretty common.
- StavrosK 9y agoOf course you don't, you're a middle-class straight white male. A society with perfect surveillance is a society with perfect law enforcement, which is a society that never has enough dissidence to evolve. Tell homosexuals in the 60s that they shouldn't care if GCHQ can read their messages. But who cares about poofs, right? They're mentally ill anyway.
- jlebrech 9y agoIn that case couldn't the government track their movements as they have a mobile phone on them. for example, you could find out who associated with a terrorist by their location history.
- numpad 9y agoCan you give an example of locations you'd look for when searching for terrorists?
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoIt's more like you'd have a map with a line that shows where the terrorist has been, you can overlay on that map everywhere every other whatsapp user has been and pull out any that spend a significant amount of time with the known terrorist. Then you know exactly who they associate with and can interrogate their profiles directly to see if they are viable suspects.
- buro9 9y agoThis is just part of signals intelligence. Once you have a known event, then you can use the information that you know about that to start asking more questions. Proximity is an obvious one, who was near or in contact with the alleged terrorist in the hours, days, weeks beforehand. Were there recurrences of close proximity amongst those individuals previously not considered persons of interest. This methodology is precisely the same as how fraud and money laundering risk is mitigated. Once you work back from a KE (known event) to build up the pattern of related activities you can use this as a signature on observed future behaviour to try and identify future activity that you'd like to investigate more closely or act on.
- jlebrech 9y agolatitude and longitude are quite popular locations for terrorists
- codegladiator 9y agoGenuine question, Are guns allowed in UK just in the same way as in US ? Also, is it so hard to come up with another way of secure communication if they ban whatsapp ? edit: also, if i could have worded that better ?
- oblio 9y agoThere's probably many alternatives to Whatsapp, if you need them... Regarding guns, no. Even police officers don't have them.
- arethuza 9y agoSome UK police officers most certainly do have access to firearms - for example airports generally have fairly heavily armed officers patrolling about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_unit
- theyregreat 9y agoThat’s incorrect. There are over 5000 Authorised Firearms Officers (AFO’s) in the UK.
- gambiting 9y agoSure, but your local street-patrolling officer does not have a gun with them. There might be one locked in their car but your ordinary policemen don't carry weapons.
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoThey don't have guns in the car. Only trained police officers are allowed to use firearms.
- briandear 9y agoWhy aren’t all cops trained to use firearms?
- y7 9y agoWhatsApp enables everyone to communicate in secret, including the >99% of people who are not criminals. This is an equally valid way to frame the debate.
- shubb 9y agoMaybe the effects of the equifax breach or a successor will be widespread enough to make the general population appreciate end to end encryption and proper security...
- sitepodmatt 9y agoI think the p2p keys generated for a WhatsApp chat should be sent to certified contractor such as Equifax for their secure mainframes to store, and their staff to monitor the communications under a 5yr non-revokable GCHQ contract...
- pritambaral 9y agoNot sure if serious or Poe's law.
- oblio 9y agoThe interesting thing about all these debates, that many here seem to forget is: these actions are awful, but in the grand scheme of things, they are actually good and a sign of progress. The reason governments do this is that due to the Internet, for the first time in human history, humans can have access to truly secure telecommunications. I'm pretty sure that before they could just phone tap/bug their way to all the communications they wanted to follow and this is proving harder today. That's why they're making so much noise about it. It will be a fight to keep the (favorable for individuals) status quo, but in my opinion the status quo is an evolution over what we had say, 40 years ago.
- pricechild 9y agoIt will be a fight to prevent people being punished for keeping secrets. The horse has bolted, it is not possible to prevent (good or bad) people communicating securely?
- BjoernKW 9y agoThere's a fundamental difference to both the pre-phone and the pre-Internet age: In the grand scheme of things phone tapping is a relatively new affair. Before the general availability of phones you needed actual human snitches to spy on dissidents and deviants. Even once phones were widely used oppressive regimes still needed a huge number of human agents because not every conversation happened on phone. Physically spying on others is both dangerous and expensive, which is why it's usually done selectively. All of that changed with the general widespread use of digital means of communication: Not only do most dissident, potentially 'dangerous' conversations take place in digital media but those conversations are also easily available for governments to harvest and draw upon to whatever end.
- mmjaa 9y agoI find it incredibly difficult to comprehend that any UK politician would use the phrase "protect people from pedophiles" with a straight face: This is a political class which has, for decades, protected its own pedophiles from prosecution. It is highly troubling that this would be being used as a public button, when there is much evidence that UK politicians have no desire, whatever, to actually prosecute the biggest pedophiles in their state - those within their own ranks.
- b3lvedere 9y agoThose who are in power want to stay in power, no matter what.
- pawelkomarnicki 9y agoWhatsapp will add EULA "service cannot be used for criminal activity" ;-)
- RegW 9y agoThat would be just too succinct. They have got a whole paragraph on Legal and Acceptable Use. https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/#terms-of-service https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/#terms-of-service
- CapitalistCartr 9y agoCriminals also have access to fast automobiles and efficient dual carriageways that enable their escapes. Further, they are using a powerful radio network to communicate with ease. We must act now to remove these things for the good of the people!
- benevol 9y agoThe UK is part of the international "five eyes" mass surveillance group. The NSA certainly has access to all Whatsapp messages. Therefor, the UK has it too. Therefor, this article certainly is nothing but propaganda.
- evgen 9y agoYou are so full of shit it is hard to know where to begin. End to end encryption means that WhatsApp does not have access to the messages, so the NSA most certainly does not. What is most annoying about delusional paranoid comments like this is that you distract from where the real fight is.
- oever 9y agoI'd prefer to see a headline like "UK government calls out Apple, Facebook and Google for spying on their citizens"
- Sacho 9y agoWe have accepted that you can curtail certain rights for criminals, so I can't see why we couldn't add "not using Whatsapp" to them. All you have to do is prove a certain person is a criminal. Innocent until proven guilty, due process, the justice system - any of these minor details ring a bell to Amber Rudd?
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoEveryone gets their apps from two places: the Apple app store and Google Play. To enforce a ban on whatsapp, all the government has to do is compel Google and Apple to pull them from the app store. The common user is currently entrenched in two walled gardens for almost all of their activity, and banning encrypted communications for 95% of the population is now feasible, and perhaps quite likely. That sucks.
- zimpenfish 9y ago> all the government has to do is compel Google and Apple to pull them from the app store. I would honestly love to see UKGOV try that. There wouldn't be enough popcorn in the world for what a disaster that would be on every level.
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoI wouldn't, it's not like Google doesn't already comply with state censorship laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google Most people would switch to something that is compliant with government legislation, very quickly. Because most people don't know or care what encryption is, they just want to talk to their friends.
- dingaling 9y agoAt least amongst Android users, packaged apps passed around for side-loading are fairly common. Just last week I saw a non-technical colleague side-loading Messenger Lite from an APK mirror site as it is not available through the Play Store in the UK. WhatsApp even have a direct APK download on their website, cutting out the middleman.
- Grollicus 9y agoWhenever I lately read things the UK government says about human rights I am soo glad they are leaving the EU.