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> Social media platforms based in the U.S. including Facebook and WhatsApp will be forced to share users’ encrypted messages with British police under a new tre
by Gys 7y ago
> Social media platforms based in the U.S. including Facebook and WhatsApp will be forced to share users’ encrypted messages with British police under a new treaty between the two countries, according to a person familiar with the matter.
This sounds as if the platforms are already sharing with the US authorities. So this being about them sharing it now with UK authorities.
- nextos 7y agoI wonder what happens with Signal as it's US-based.
- robert_foss 7y agoMaybe @moxie could enlighten us.
- hos234 7y agoNothing. Whoever is interested, has to get hold of the phones to access the messages.
- cheschire 7y agoHistorical messages, yes. However an app maker can be coerced into adding a hidden user that can participate in chats and receive all future messages decrypted. It doesn't require any special crypto hacks for that to work.
- zzzcpan 7y agoSignal may or may not be ok at the moment, but not in a couple of years (it has all the power to silently push an update with a backdoor). Among all the popular messaging apps only Telegram is in a position to not cooperate with five eyes.
- aorth 7y agoSure, but the Signal source code is open source. I've been compiling it myself for years on Android (and signing the binary with my own key). They can't silently push a binary from the Play Store and overwrite my binary.
- zzzcpan 7y agoThey still can for everyone else, probably everyone you talk to over Signal, so not much of a protection. Pretty much the only way to avoid that is for Signal to give up that control, don't supply Signal directly and let others build Signal from sources and publish in independent from Signal package repositories, i.e. f-droid, OS package managers on Linux, etc. Even if they don't federate, it will at least make their end-to-end encryption sound, not useless like it is now when everyone uses Signal supplied binaries.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoPresumably, for most of us here, even if we compiled it ourselves, most of the people we'll communicate with won't.
- abledon 7y agoDude, I can only imagine what you are doing that you need to be so secretive lol
- aorth 7y agoI think "trust, but verify" and "verifiable security" are good axioms.
- eitland 7y ago
- mancerayder 7y agoI didn't read that - are you sure about this? I am reading that backdoors are being asked to be created on WhatsApp. Anyway the messages aren't stored. From the article: Priti Patel, the U.K.’s home secretary, has previously warned that Facebook’s plan to enable users to send end-to-end encrypted messages would benefit criminals, and called on social media firms to develop “back doors” to give intelligence agencies access to their messaging platforms.
- kenny87 7y ago> has previously warned That's the UK's position but it's not clear from the article that some kind of forced backdoor made it into the treaty, just that WhatsApp will be forced to share users’ encrypted messages. But they have already been sharing encrypted messages through other legal means. More speculation here: https://www.justsecurity.org/24145/u-s-u-k-data-sharing-treaty/ https://www.justsecurity.org/24145/u-s-u-k-data-sharing-trea...
- amyboyd 7y ago> "I didn't read that" Why comment if you didn't read the article? It's in the first paragraph: "Social media platforms based in the U.S. including Facebook and WhatsApp will be forced to share users’ encrypted messages with British police under a new treaty"
- wj 7y agoHe is saying that he didn't interrupt that from the article--not that he didn't read the article.
- tiernano 7y agoIf I'm reading that right, they are getting the encrypted messages, not the decrypted ones. Either whoever wrote the article doesn't know the different or the uk police have been fucked over by the us...
- semi-extrinsic 7y agoIt's been true for a long time that since intelligence agencies aren't supposed to spy on their own citizens, they agree to spy on each other's citizens instead and subsequently share the data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- adrianmonk 7y agoThere are two ways to read it. "Encrypted" could mean that's how they'll be delivered to the UK. Or it could be a definition of the set of which messages are in question. The set is defined as the ones that users expected were supposed to be protected by encryption (or that government could not access because of encryption). In other words, from the phrasing alone, it's not clear whether "encrypted" describes the state of the messages or the scope of the sharing.
- pjc50 7y agoIt's laundering. The idea is presumably to circumvent US rules on domestic spying by having GCGQ do it and transfer it to US agencies. Similarly the UK has had its spying ruled unlawful under ECHR: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/13/gchq-data-collection-violated-human-rights-strasbourg-court-rules https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/13/gchq-data-co... (perhaps this is why Richard Dearlove, "C" of MI6, is so Brexity)
- cheez 7y agoThis guy read Snowden.
- MiroF 7y agoWe urgently need new domestic spying laws given that five eyes has effectively broken them.
- classified 7y agoIf people in a position of power can break those laws with impunity then new laws aren't going to change that. The problem is holding the lawbreakers accountable.
- hannasanarion 7y agoNot if the lawbreaking is enabled by a loophole, as in this case. Closing the loophole may not be enough, but it should be the first priority.
- anigbrowl 7y agoIt's important but you need to consider the situation where the government is corrupt. The Us is about to impeach the President; and the two factions in government are each accusing the other of corruption, albeit using wildly different criteria.
- hannasanarion 7y ago