Every time you hear about something like this or read an article about something like this you have to slow down for a moment and realize that we brought this on ourselves. The original intent of the internet was <i>peer to peer</i>, not global centralized services that we all connect to.<p>There is no technical reason why something like whatsapp can't be peer-to-peer. Choosing for a centralized service is implicitly choosing for giving the powers that be the opportunity to massively listen in on our various modes of conversation, to figure out your 'graph' <i>and/or</i> to allow censorship.<p>An old quote has that the internet sees censorship as a routing problem and will route around the break. But that only works if we explicitly refuse to allow centralized services.
I found it interesting that a "right-to-information (RTI)" activist would be against encryption, calling national security reasons. It seems RTI is the Indian version of FOIA (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Information_Act,_2005" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Information_Act,_2005</a>) which confuses me even more - how are those connected?<p>I could kind of see how the plaintext communication makes bribery and similar things harder (which is what RTI should prevent), but if that's the reasoning it seems to be really backwards.
One of the arguments against mass surveillance is that it is blatant intrusion of privacy, and hence it should not exist.<p>On the other hand, the arguments against encryption seem to be that it cripples the Government agencies in their work against terrorists, which is a genuine concern.<p>There seems to be no way to address both these major concerns (that I am aware of), and hence the battle between privacy advocates and the camp against encryption in the name of national security will continue.<p>Banning a single service such as WhatsApp is not a solution to this problem. If someone really wants their communication to be encrypted, they can easily make it happen using the numerous tools available, and there is nothing the Government can do about it.
It struck me as I was reading this, the entire reason this is even a possible thing is the advent of the "App Store"<p>If users obtained thier software elsewhere, the system could still "ban" it, but people would still obtain it.<p>With the app stores, it becomes fairly easy for a government to unilaterally ban a piece of software.
> almost impossible for even a super computer<p>"Almost" impossible is a stretch. It's regarded as impractical regardless of computational power or other available resources with current computational technology. We might as well not even try.<p>> Decrypting a single 256-bit encrypted message would take hundreds of years, Yadav said.<p>That's an interesting way to phrase it.
To someone new to crypto, how do companies like WhatsApp implement their end-to-end encryption? Where are keys generated and how are they persisted in a way that allows messages to be re-read no matter what device users are running the app from but doesn't allow governments any chance at access to the keys?
Mass surveillance does not stop terrorism effectively.<p>Bruce Schneier wrote a book called Data and Goliath and touches on the subject a bit. Simply to many false positives are detected.<p>But how will governments decrypt communications you say?<p>Simple, they hack the devices performing the communication, if they are important enough. They can then get the key if needed. Encryption forces governments to do targeted surveillance.<p>This isn't just about whats app, it's about all crypto systems. Without privacy, you have no liberty.
I wonder how someone like this can call themself an activist, when it is obvious that they have not even thought about it once. If you are truely a terrorist, it takes you a few hours to implement a one-time-pad solution that will be unbreakable (and you cannot prevent that, there is not much knowledge needed for that). Only thing needed is a source of randomness but since we are talking about messaging, we do not even need more than a megabyte of it.<p>But well, I am from europe, looking forward to you kicking out your security industry and outsourcing it to us. Thanks for that.
Many comments here say that it is an intrusion of privacy but a random machine sitting some corner of the world, parsing boatload of data(including yours) and detecting that there is an act of terrorism and in effect saving people. I am OK with that machine parsing through my data. I feel that when you write your email or uploading photos on FB/Instagram or send a tweet ,A machine is already doing that and many people still use all these services . Also technically some Facebook/Google/Twitter employee can look at all those data if he wants to.So i believe govnt should get a provision to look deep into the data if it needs to save a one person or a hundred people.I do reflect the concerns discussed here [1]<p>I am saying that a provision should be given for government or any agency if it helps saving people's lives but only with a warrant or better scrutiny for the request. Shouldn't that be the case?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/jun/14/nsa-prism" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/jun/14/nsa-...</a>
This is probably my US-centrism talking, but it seems like the title could be updated to reflect that this is <i>India</i>'s Supreme Court, not the US Supreme Court.
Just to be clear this is the <i>Indian Supreme Court</i>. While it is from the indiatimes.com english language news outfit, I would assume the majority of readers on HN are not indian. Context here is important, as some may not read the article unfortunately, and even then, it isn't immeadiately clear.
Title is terribly missing which country you're talking about. Most here would assume the US, in which case the title would have more audience. So while I understand the intent is to have more audience, the integrity of communication is lost.