To Encrypt or Not to Encrypt | TechTree.com

To Encrypt or Not to Encrypt

...Is the billion-user question

 

A Brazil court ordered a ban on WhatsApp for three days, starting Monday 2 PM local time (around 10 PM India time). All telcos must comply with the order. The issue is, the court needs WhatsApp chat records related to a drug investigation, which WhatsApp can’t provide.

That, in turn, is because just last month, WhatsApp updated its software to support full encryption — which means that even the Facebook-owned company can’t access chats in unencrypted form. “After cooperating (fully) with the local courts, we are disappointed a judge... decided yet again to order the block of WhatsApp in Brazil,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said. “(They want to) force us to turn over information we repeatedly said we don’t have.”

Which initially sounds weird: Would a court be so un-tech-savvy and stubborn as to not understand that WhatsApp just can’t access the chats it’s being asked for?

But the actual weird thing is the full encryption in the first place. When chats (or any other communications) are fully encrypted, there’s no possibility of a criminal investigation going ahead — if the criminals communicated over such a system.

WhatsApp went to the extent of alerting users to unencrypted chat: If one person in a group chat were to be using an older (without full encryption) version of the software, everyone will be informed that the chat wasn’t fully encrypted.

The reason, as The Guardian reports, has its roots in the personal values of WhatsApp founder Jan Koum. “I grew up in the USSR during communist rule and the fact that people couldn’t speak freely is one of the reasons my family moved to the United States.”

Now that’s the polar opposite of the Police State, where President Obama has “the complete control of all communication systems within the US.”
But it’s extreme.


TAGS: WhatsApp, Encryption

 
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