
WhatsApp accused of giving terrorists 'a secret place to hide' - vixen99
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/26/home-secretary-amber-rudd-whatsapp-gives-terrorists-place-hide/
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merricksb
Active discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13959953](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13959953)

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sidcool
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?

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asr
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.

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

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stillmotion
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.

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danieldk
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._

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photonios
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.

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orless
(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.

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duncan-donuts
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?

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hackerboos
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](http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39396578)

