Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban
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Mark's talk about privacy is, in my opinion, totally misplaced. No right is absolute, and that includes the right to privacy. Criminals, for example, simply don't have it. This is not me saying; this is our Constitution saying it (and the Constitution of every Western country that I know).
We are biased to see all measures against privacy with bad eyes, specially after Snowden. But that's because you are good people and see the matter with those eyes, not with the eyes of a criminal. Do you guys think that pedophiles, terrorists and drug dealers have the right to privacy ? I don't.
Also, what the NSA was (is?) doing is a complete absurd, with no judicial oversight, mass collecting everything they can get in secrecy. This has nothing to do with what we have here. In Brazil, only a judge can authorize someone to be wiretapped, it can only be done in criminal cases with jail time (no civil cases). Also, the judge must specify a single phone number or single e-mail account and the decision must be reviewed every 15 days, otherwise it expires. Also, there's a national database of wiretaps that every judge must feed by the end of the month, specifying how many wiretaps there are currently running.
WhatsApp and Facebook are not, by any means, above the law. If they want to provide a communication service here, the law is clear that they must abide by judicial orders that allow wiretapping in very specific cases.
Do you mean _alleged_ criminals? Yes, they do.
Convicted criminals, on the other hand, don't have that right already.
Wiretapping is needed during the investigation phase, which you need to gather evidence BEFORE trialling and convicting anyone. And is only authorized if you have strong evidence that a crime or criminal organization is in place.
If only convicted criminals didn't have right to privacy, how would you get them convicted in the first place ?
Also, you really got it 100% backwards. Convicted criminals have right to privacy after they are convicted, because we don't assume they will commit new crimes.
Everybody is presumed innocent until proven otherwise. We must have new evidence that convicted criminals are commiting crimes to start a new wiretap.
Not by fishing for something you can construct into proof.
So no, your argument doesn't make any logical sense.
If privacy is a human right that cannot be violated ever, how are going to deal with criminals that use services such as WhatsApp?
By finding evidence that does not rely on services such as WhatsApp. How did anybody ever get convicted before the age of WhatsApp, or for that matter the invention of the telephone. It's not as if wiretaps and cell phone messages are the only kind of incriminating evidence that can be found on the vast majority of crimes. And if that is the evidence that stands between a free man/woman and their conviction then maybe it is better that they go free because it is all too easy to forge such evidence or to plant it.
A nitpick, but I really dislike this line of reasoning. Before WhatsApp criminals communicated using different means which were easier to monitor. Now that they have WhatsApp (or whatever), they will use that instead of easier to monitor methods. A move to modern communication tools gives them an edge over law enforcement, so it's no surprise LE feels a pressing need to do something about it. It's an arms race.
Perhaps sloppy criminals did so, but the careful were engaging in schemes more like what we see on "The Wire". Meeting in secluded, noisy locations wherein privacy was all but guaranteed.
People, including not-convicted criminals, have the right to privacy. If the NSA and law enforcement are going to make it harder and harder to find private places through dragnet collection, it should not be surprising that the populace will seek to reclaim privacy.
If it's an arms race, as you say, it's an arms race that law enforcement was winning at so one-sidedly that the relationship was becoming abusive. Tools like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc., are the citizenry's first efforts at serious competition.
And lest you think that this is only a problem with China, America has the exact same issue. The FISA court was supposed to hear requests for people's private info but it was a glorified rubber stamp, granting 99.9999% of requests. And that's the problem, you cannot have a free and vibrant democracy when people's privacy is negotiable.
Perhaps that sounds like hyperbole, but have a look at what other commenters are saying about fishing expeditions and tell me if you still think so.
It's my opinion that in any reasonably developed and old democracy a majority of the population are currently criminals in the sense that they have broken at least one law.
In reality, that law is either trivial, inconsistently enforced, or generally ignored. But the important thing is that it's still on the books as the law of the land, and therefore makes the citizen prosecutable in a court of law.Whether or not that individual is prosecuted then becomes the folly of most systems -- a choice that can be arbitrarily made (as it's never incorrect for the government to enforce its current laws, even if it can be unjust).
As a consequence of all the above... pre-investigation is tantamount to power-to-convict. And privacy is the only effective deterrent against "I would like to find some crime you're guilty of and then charge you with it because {unrelated and non-legally-based rationale}". Imho, this is the fundamental and most dangerous type of corruption a democracy can fall institutional victim to, because it only requires that there be a large number of rarely-enforced laws on the book (a systemic weakness of democracy where repealing a law takes more effort than leaving it valid) and individuals of questionable motive (human nature) in positions of power.
(I'm perfectly willing to accept that others may have a different viewpoint on democracy, but I think I historical support as to this is the actual way a mature legal system functions)
In countries where legal expenses are high and punishments are sever (i.e. the USA) it can be trivial to find something damning enough to put someone behind bars. In countries where the bar for prison sentencing is substantially higher and legal costs are more manageable the most authorities could do is waste someone's time. This is one of those aspects in which societies the world over markedly differ.
In a completely transparent system, you'll still have bad or questionable laws. You'll just have them only applied to people who can't buy their way out.
Unless complete transparency also solves the corruption problem. ;)
After someone is convicted, there's no use on wiretaping him about something that was already solved.
How simple is it to make someone an alleged criminal, well, that's country specific. Can also be thought on how easy is to have a government receiving data directly from Facebook, or using gag orders, or bombing another country without proofs of any wrongdoing.
1. No, you don't make someone an alleged criminal by simply accusing them of a crime. You need preliminary proofs that a) a crime is happening and b) your target is most likely the author of that crime. Judges are really demanding when analyzing this proof before authorizing a wiretap.
If you authorize a wiretap and you find out a crime, but later the lawyer can demonstrate that the wiretap was illegal (because the judge didn't have enough preliminary proof), the crime discovered is considered to be discovered "by chance", so it nullifies the entire result of the wiretap, based on the theory named "fruits of the poisonous tree", and unless you have enough evidence that doesn't derive at all from the wiretap, the defendant won't be convicted.
2. Read the newspaper in Brazil and you'll see the country is harshly investigating our politicians. We have a senator in jail by a supreme court's order as we speak for god's sake.
3. The same law in Brazil that authorizes wiretapping (Law nº 9296 from 1996) criminalizes with 2 to 4 years of jail anyone that does a wiretap without judicial order or with abuse of power.
Definition of "most likely" varies wildly. Without concrete proof, any breach of privacy seems corrupt to me.
Click the timestamp of the comment (or find another way to access the permalink for the comment). The reply link should appear.
You may hold any opinion you want, but the above is in Brazilian Constitution, and not even contested by anybody.
They certainly do not have evidence that every citizen and every foreigner (total 7 billion people) is a pedophile, terrorist or even a jaywalker.
I for one have lost any faith in governance in the information age, and will happily encrypt my communication. If I can sabotage for the organisations spying on me, that is a net win.
What I don't understand is why you bring that point to a discussion about WatsApp hiding information about an specific crime.
I would rather the rest of us have this right protected in spite of the fact that some criminals will get it as well.
> Also, the judge must specify a single phone number or single e-mail account and the decision must be reviewed every 15 days, otherwise it expires. Also, there's a national database of wiretaps that every judge must feed by the end of the month, specifying how many wiretaps there are currently running.
Great way to apply natural negative pressure on continuing wiretap operations. It's not impossible to have a wiretap span a long period of time, but it will create work for the judge and (possibly?) the officers, so in general it will hopefully only happen when it's actually useful. Kudos.
Not saying the oversight system in Brazil is unreasonable, but you can't rely on the natural disincentives alone.
So, you either have secure communication systems available for everybody, and accept that the government is not always going to get what it wants, or you don't.
There is no such thing as a secure system that a third-party can read if it chooses to. By definition.
One-time pads have been around for more than a century. Book ciphers can be quite secure and are centuries old. Criminals have been substituting phrases (e.g. "I gave the flowers to Wanda" -> "I murdered Bob the Snitch") since they've been aware they might be eavesdropped upon.
It has pretty much always been the case that you can encrypt your correspondence if you wish and then the state can attempt to read it anyway if they wish, and in states which require this sort of thing, if they can get a warrant.
Encrypting your correspondence has gotten easier. Nobody would have bothered to use a good cipher for "Don't forget to get eggs at the store" (meaning, actually get eggs, not some substitute phrase for "murder Bob the Snitch") twenty years ago, but now we do it all the time.
But that doesn't change a whole lot. Criminals who gave a shit about not being spied upon have always had ways to ensure it couldn't happen.
What about the right to life, or the right to not be tortured?
Right to not be tortured is debatable
No right is absolute, and there is no single hierarchy of rights. Read Isaiah Berlin's seminal Four Essays on Liberty on why.
Prima facie, there may be a case for there to be an absolute right not to be tortured, but depending on the moral framework - utilitarian, say - one can make a case for allowing torture in specific circumstances. Hence, not an absolute right.
With the amount of money the drug cartels have, it will be trivial for them to simply hire developers to write them a secure messaging app.
All you do by restricting things like WhatsApp is deny secure communication to law-abiding people and make the criminal's life slightly more inconvenient if he wants to be able to communicate securely. But you can't stop it.
That 'well meaning judges' have a harder time obtaining evidence in those cases where wire-taps are authorized with sufficient reasons and specificity (sp?) is a direct consequence of that.
But you shouldn't complain about the companies that merely provide what the market now wants.
Technology is strange that way, we, technologists can relatively easily make boxes that we ourselves can no longer open and those boxes can be used to transport information from one private individual to another.
Yes, the existence of such boxes may be an obstacle to law enforcement. But the rights of ordinary citizens are trampled to such an extent that I'd be willing to live in a society where those rights are restored if the consequence of that is that the police will have to work that much harder to gather evidence or that some criminals will get away with their crimes.
Authorities have overstepped their bounds to such an extent that this is now an acceptable compromise.
"If they want to provide a communication service here, the law is clear that they must abide by judicial orders that allow wiretapping in very specific cases."
I didn't the grandparent to be complaining. Simply stating that they are upholding the law of the country, which WhatsApp decided to ignore. The fact that it had massive popular adaption means WhatsApp may decide it should play ball, or the citizens of the country will get the laws changed. All of this is GOOD and indicates a WELL functioning society. Nothing is broken or bad because an App gets banned.
That's scary. Well, there is a first time for everything.
> Simply stating that they are upholding the law of the country, which WhatsApp decided to ignore.
Have a read:
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/brazi...
Brazil is not exactly a paragon of virtue when it comes to police force and legal affairs. Let's give the GGP a free pass for being entirely of 'good intentions', that still leaves you with a police apparatus that is involved in, amongst other things, unlawful killings and the use of torture, they rank 69th on the world corruption index, roughly around the region of such examples of upstanding morality with the authorities of Bulgaria, Romania, Greece and Italy.
If this were North-Korea or China everybody would be cheering on Whatsapp and FB for making a stand and not cooperating with the authorities.
Companies can make it easy on themselves by avoiding hard choices on which regimes to support in their quest for wire-tapping and which not by not having a footprint in a jurisdiction where such abuses are common and at the same time make it has hard as possible technically to actually cooperate in the first place. What you can't do you also can't be compelled to do.
The people of Brazil then have the option to make the use of such software illegal or not.
We got the highest homicide count on the planet, being a country that banned guns. That, for sure, makes police more agressive.
Also:
"Between January and November in 2014, 816 people were murdered by military police officers in the state of São Paulo." - and it did not reduce crime [2]
[1] http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2015/11/1704292-morte...
[2] http://ponte.org/pm-de-sp-bate-recorde-de-mortes-e-nao-reduz...
If you already have proof that somebody is a pedophile, terrorist or drug dealer, why would you need to wire tap them and invade their privacy anyway?
The problem is, that by definition, you can't take away privacy from criminals without taking it away from everyone else. Especially when term criminal varies from country to country -- in this case it might be a drug lord, but i.e. in Russia it might be an opposition leader or journalist that dug too deep.
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10749400, it is claimed that "It says basically that police can require records of visited CONTENT without a court order and the ISP is required to supply that without informing the user." He is corrected by someone saying the text means metadata and not content.
Which is true? Do you not consider grabbing metadata to be a wiretap?
Metadata is still privacy infringing personal data.
For example, if the cops starts investigating John Doe they may ask the service provider to keep metadata for a fixed period of time, stated on the Marco Civil (six months IIRC). But access to this metadata can only be authorized by a judge.
Edit: Reread the Marco civil an refreshed my memory. What I said is not entirely correct. All metadata is kept by default and needs a court order to be accessed. What authorities may ask without a court order is for the service provider to keep the metadata for a time longer than specified on the Marco civil.
Also, as I said on my previous comment, the intention of the bill was that only metadata was recorded, but the term "registros de conexão -> connections log" is vague enough to be interpreted in other ways :(
You determine who is a criminal so you determine who has the right to privacy? Maybe you are a reasonable person but I think it is naive to operate under the assumption that governments/judges will always be reasonable. I think indeed that you may be spied upon when you are suspect of a crime but to force Whatsapp to store all messages (diminishing everyone's privacy) due to a couple of criminals sounds like a bad idea to me.
So the right to privacy should be absolute, until you disrespect other people's rights (the only thing that should be a crime). So do good policing, don't take privacy away from innocent, free (wo)men.
Same goes for the right to free speech.
For example, if someone is broadcasting to 1 million people, their message should adhere to some standards. If something is really a popular message, it can be spread using "totally protected" speech to up to 1000 people at a time. I think giving a platform to ISIS and others to easily spread their mind virus and continually infect some susceptible 0.1% is irresponsible. Inciting violence on public television would have been unacceptable and regulated.
It's an economic concept known as the free rider problem. If you guarantee total protection to speech for ANY number of recipients, people and organizations will find ways to abuse it. The free tier should be limited.
Ideas replicating, on the other hand, is only limited by the amount of attention / allegiance any given person has. The only way we'll get a free rider problem there is when computers spread ideas among each other like computer viruses. And for that, we need to secure our protocols and implementations.
I don't agree with that statement at any level! Those 1 million people have absolute freedom to listen or to not listen. This puts you in the position of telling people they can't hear something they want to hear.
As a bonus, those standards you mention can easily become a cudgel against people the government wants to implicitly or explicitly silence.
The government won't be able to silence a true message that doesn't "hijack mass media" and spreads by 1-to-1000 at a time.
Do you realize that at one point you yourself could be in a position where you disagree with your government and you want to speak up only to find your message being silenced constantly?
Either all people are equal or they are not, some people can not be more equal than others.
When you let mass media be used by ISIS and others in the name of free speech, you're giving them a free way to do super-untargeted advertising to their new recruits.
People can choose what to hear. It's not random, It's the complete opposite of random.
Anyway you haven't addressed the downsides I posted. All you do is ignore them in favor of the upsides. I could be an anarcho capitalist and insist on the unlimited right to property, also. Saying it's a moral right and ignoring any downsides.
The mass media has a responsibility all right, but not the one you think they do.
And what do you think their responsibility actually is? I thought they had rights to say whatever they want and responsibility is optional...
And I think their responsibility is the conditions under which they were given broadcast licenses in the first place. Something about serving the public good.
And we are not talking 0.1%, we are talking about a lot less than 1 in 1000 and that is important here. I strongly believe that taking freedom away, i.e. by prescribing what the standards are that messages should adhere to, will breed disrespect, anger, hate, feelings of oppression.
A mind virus does not ignite among happy, free people, it ignites among oppressed people. We should avoid oppressing people.
Of course WhatsApp and Facebook are not above the law, but was the decision reasonable at all?
Good point. Similar thing can be said about law enforcement. They see bad all the time, so they are more likely to see everything as bad and push for legislation that is privacy restrictive because of that. Good people who see good need to be vigilant so that their rights are not diminished.
Isn't that's how it works with phone calls?
I have to disagree with you on this Sir. Criminals have the essential uncontested right to privacy like everybody else. However, law enforcement have the right too to collect and gather info on subjects to prepare a case and prosecute in a court of law but that gathering and collecting should only be limited to the scope of investigation and suspected criminal activities without going after their personal lives and tiny details of their intimate relationships and also without feeding the shameless media these bits of information because if you cross that line, you'd gradually but assuredly lose the moral high ground for your position and then those suspects/criminals would look like victims in the eyes of the public and you guys as the bad guys and trust me you don't wanna lose the public opinion battle.
You're looking at this the other way round. It's not that privacy makes it harder to foster a civilized society, but removing makes it totally impossible.
Is amuses me that you would see this as post Snowden or even American issue. As a Brazilian I know our state is much more corrupt and inapt, and the risks are an order of magnitude higher for us, Snowden or not.
See here for some of the rational: http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/we-should-all-have-somethin...
Unfortunately, no technology can differentiate between criminal and innocent, only human can. The implication is to decide the priority: privacy for criminals or no privacy for innocents.
WhatsApp could not deliver what the judge requested, even if they wanted to. Messages are encrypted end to end and not kept in their servers.
The Judge requested something impossible. predictably, WhatsApp and Facebook did not comply. The Judge threw a hissy fit and decided to block the service, affecting everyone who uses it (95% of the Internet users in the country).
A similar thing happened years ago when a Brazilian actress tried to get a paparazzi video out of YouTube. The heavy-handedness of Brazilian government got the whole website blocked.
Mark Zuckerberg's complaint is about how any local judge can just order a country-wide order (which is something I also find baffling). This was not a supreme court decision.
"Sir the pen manufactures said they can't comply"
"Ok that's it, stop the sales of all pens"
Then everyone starts using pencils.
I guess I don't get the analogy.
To extend the analogy, the government might order all manufacturers to build sensors and antennas into every writing instrument. That might work, until people start smuggling cheaper, foreign-made, non-spying pens into the country.
Signal (née TextSecure) runs on Android and iOS, with an in-development Chrome extension (or whatever) to run where Chrome runs.
This quote from the post really stands out to me:
"WhatsApp runs on an incredible number of mobile platforms, so full deployment will be an incremental process as we add TextSecure protocol support into each WhatsApp client platform. We have a ways to go until all mobile platforms are fully supported, but we are moving quickly towards a world where all WhatsApp users will get end-to-end encryption by default."
It seems... unlikely that the crypto integration would be left half-done. I guess I could find a Whatsapp user with an iDevice and another with an Android device and look at the software UI for clues. :D
I know nothing of Brazilian law, but in America, criminals have rights, including the right to privacy. Convicted criminals and convicted felons do not, but that is an entirely different category, and your wording seems woefully imprecise.
> Do you guys think that pedophiles, terrorists and drug dealers have the right to privacy ? I don't.
Alleged pedophiles, terrorists and drug dealers have the full panoply of rights available to them as anyone else until such time as enough supporting evidence may be provided that the police can say that a) a crime has been committed, b) the alleged had the means to have committed the crime, c) the alleged had the motive to have committed the crime, d) the alleged had the opportunity to have committed the crime, and often e) the alleged is very likely to have committed the crime.
Only after THAT hurdle is cleared may the rights of the alleged criminal be intruded upon by the state, and without a grand jury, even those intrusions must be minimally invasive.
At least in America, a judge cannot issue a warrant for the wiretaps you described on the mere accusation that "so and so is a {pedophile,terrorist,drug dealer}."
Regarding privacy though, I think we're in agreement that the only people who don't have it are those that are currently incarcerated as a result of due process.
I think your post rests on uncharitably interpreting what he means by absolute rights. Your post itself is a demonstration that the right to privacy is not absolute - if the criteria you describe are met, a wiretap can be permitted. He was talking about the fundamental question of whether or not a state has the right to set and apply those criteria (at least, within reasonable limits) within its borders.
I am not a judge, nor a lawyer, but as someone who's been casually studying law for years, the thing I've noticed most about lawyers is that they tend to not speak in anywhere near such sweeping generalities, and felt it worth correcting as it would be unfortunate, and potentially dangerous if the wrong person were to take the word of a judge as canon and start enacting social justice against alleged criminals.
I deliberately avoided touching on the "no rights are absolute" statement because it is charged, and while it is grossly overused to the point of being tired, I was specifically trying to not open that particular can of worms. Also, any such discussion would possibly have furthered the gulf between "rights in Brazil" and "rights in America", which I can't begin to comment on intelligently, whereas "criminals are still entitled to due process" is a shorter bridge in either country.
4th amendment litigation is full of really questionable reasons for "probable cause" for warrantless searches, and then there's things like the FBI fake base stations and the NSA listening programme.
The EU has a general right to privacy .. with a law enforcement exception.
Yes we do. It isn't enumerated, but our rights are not limited to merely those which were enumerated.
For starters, lets throw right to privacy out the window, from the US perspective what we are talking about is 4th Amendment "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."
>Only after THAT hurdle is cleared may the rights of the alleged criminal be intruded upon by the state...
No. In many instances police are not limited to obtaining a warrant/judicial oversight before conducting searches and seizures (including communications). Just a few examples: (a) if an officer conducts a lawful traffic stop, and smells marijuana (plain-view/plain-smell doctrine) the officer can lawfully search your person and the vehicle,seizing any evidence of a crime, even if unrelated to marijuana; or (b) subsequent to a DUI arrest, an officer can impound the vehicle and conduct a search/inventory of the vehicle and seize any evidence of a crime (even unrelated to the DUI). These are some of the many lawful Government searches and seizures without prior judicial approval.
>At least in America, a judge cannot issue a warrant for the wiretaps you described on the mere accusation that "so and so is a {pedophile,terrorist,drug dealer}."
A judge certainly can issue a warrant based on accusation as long as the judge makes a finding there is probable cause. In fact an officer can obtain a warrant from a Judge based on an anonymous tip, or what would be called hearsay evidence which would be inadmissible in an actual trial.
It sounds like you are rather pedantically making a distinction between criminals and convicted criminals.
This is part of the problem, in a way, and why - for example - Russia and China are developing their own versions of operating systems, so as not to have all their communications be snooped on by Microsoft and its host government's spooks. The latest Windows is a notorious privacy hog with nary a way to opt out anymore.
But notice the difference: facebook and WhatsApp are centralized by design and all traffic goes through their servers. Windows, on the other hand, is installed locally and only "phones home" as an auxiliary feature (for now). So, theoretically, once it is set up, you can install a DNS proxy between you and servers out-of-the-country and it will still work.
We need MORE open source software that anyone can install, inspect and administer. Perhaps Free software in the sense of FSF. We need this kind of software to run our social networks, on our own servers under our control. There is very little reason why messages between people in an African village or a cruise ship have to bounce halfway around the world through Facebook's satellites to its headquarters before going back. Also, a lot of document collaboration in classrooms would be faster if it used IPFS and intranets instead of Google Docs. And so forth.
Decentralize all the things! Then, the developers of the software would indeed not be bound by the law, but only the hosts. And the hosts would be small and distributed enough that only warrants issued to a specific host would be effective, and not general sniffing of all traffic on a social network!
If you want this future, we are building it: http://qbix.com/platform
> No right is absolute, and that includes the right to privacy
Indeed true.
That's why you see Brazilian politicians embezzling billions of dollars and running away with it. At the same time, impoverished individuals are imprisoned for years after stealing a basket of eggs (literally).
No, it's not the same as in the U.S. Many innocent Americans are put in jail because they didn't know their rights. Impoverished Brazilians are not even given that choice.
The law isn't the same for everyone. If a Brazilian with a college education is arrested, he goes to a different, more pompous, prison "by law".
At least in the US we presume innocence. Defendants are not criminals and their rights must be respected.
But your real mistake is in the _presumption_ that somebody is a criminal. Convicted pedophiles shouldn't have a right to privacy. But we're talking about the general population. Everybody who has not been convicted does have full rights to privacy, and you cannot violate that right simply to "check" if every person has committed a crime or not... that is the literal definition of a police state.
I doubt that you're actually a judge.
Yes until they do something illegal.
I'm glad you're not a judge in my country. I'm sorry if it sounds to violent, but that phrase...
So let me get this straight. The president is risking an impeachment, there is renewed discontent with the unprecedented levels of corruption... And some unknown judge, representing an unknown plaintiff, bans a mass communication tool used by 93 million Brazilians daily, by requesting something the people responsible for the tool are capable of producing...? That sounds like an awful lot of bullshit to me.
To be fair, some Brazilian judges are pretty stupid and have no idea how the internet works so it's quite possible the original users data request was super broad and that's why Facebook and WhatsApp just ignored it. On the other hand, it's only through very effective wires and digital data examination in recent years that the Brazilian justice is finally putting some big sharks into jail. That's why I have mixed feelings about all this (and I'm a Telegram user myself).
Source, in Portuguese: http://gizmodo.com.br/investigacao-trafico-droga-bloqueio-wh...
Also, even if it was broad, you don't get to ignore judicial orders. You answer to them giving your reasons and appealing if you don't agree. Ignoring them will get you either punished or arrested.
WhatsApp notoriously doesn't even have an office in Brazil. No way to even get a judicial order to them.
Facebook, the parent company, simply says they are Facebook and not WhatsApp, so they can't help.
By the way, the judge in case actually demonstrated quite a deep understanding of the web. Unable to get WhatsApp to comply, he ordered all telecoms to block WhatsApp IP addresses, which was quite a smart move.
If, say, a valid legal authority in Iran issues some judicial order that affects me or some content that I have published (even if it is accessible in Iran), then it is perfectly reasonable to ignore it as long as I'm not in Iran, don't have an office there, etc.
I am not and should not be bound by Iran's laws and judgements, I reside elsewhere. Whatsapp is not and should not be bound by Brazil's laws and judgements, they reside elsewhere. If their host country allows (or requires!) them to protect user privacy, then they should follow their own laws, not those of Brazil.
Should Whatsapp censor messages critical of Thailand's royalty because they are illegal there? Should Whatsapp censor messages that are blasphemous and thus illegal in some places? Should Whatsapp give up personal details of the users who have made such illegal messages? In my opinion definitely NO.
Countries should not get to export their restrictions across the globe, they can either participate in the global network with an understanding that foreign companies will follow their laws and not yours, or countries can self-isolate as in this case Brazil has done.
The judge's decision to block WhatsApp in Brazil, hoewever, is completely within their jurisdiction. So in order to fight it, WhatsApp would have to go to Brazil. Otherwise they'll just lose a very big market.
That's nice to say in theory, but in practice it doesn't work. Just ask Microsoft. [1] [2]
Fact of the matter is, if the Metropolitan police came to Facebook with the proper paperwork requesting data on a British user as part of a criminal case, Facebook would cooperate with them.
> Should Whatsapp censor messages critical of Thailand's royalty because they are illegal there?
No. But if Thailand decides to prosecute someone for making these statements via WhatsApp, then they have every right to legally request the data from WhatsApp. A user in Thailand broke Thai laws.
> Should Whatsapp censor messages that are blasphemous and thus illegal in some places?
Again, no. But if the jurisdiction decides to charge someone for breaking the law, WhatsApp and Facebook must cooperate with the legal request for data. To ignore such a request is circumventing due process.
> Should Whatsapp give up personal details of the users who have made such illegal messages?
Yes. If the request follows the legal process in the jurisdiction, then of course WhatsApp should be obligated to hand over the data.
What you're essentially saying is that if someone in the US plans a bombing of American citizens via WhatsApp, and if the FBI finds out of this plot and decides to request the data from WhatsApp, WhatsApp has every legal right to tell the FBI to fuck off. [3]
Obviously this is ridiculous. Someone did something which was against the laws of their country of residence, and that country has every right to legally prosecute them for breaking the law. To claim that WhatsApp is somehow immune from this simply because they're a foreign company operating in that country is ridiculous.
> with an understanding that foreign companies will follow their laws and not yours
Sorry, that's not how business works. Just ask VW about their recent 'dieselgate' incident if you need an example.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/09/microsoft-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corporation_v._Unite...
[3] http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-terror-messagi...
Whatsapp has a duty to protect their user's privacy. Unless they receive a binding legal order from their authorities (in Whatsapp's case, USA) it is entirely right to ignore nonbinding requests from judges in Brazil, Thailand, Iran or everywhere else. Simply submitting to out-of-jurisdiction authorities is not due process, it is sharing personal data with third parties without the user's consent which (IANAL, IMHO) is legal in USA but would be prohibited if, for example, Whatsapp was headquartered in EU.
In your examples, the listed companies (or their appropriate subsidiaries) are subject to those laws because they are headquarted there, those laws are their local laws exactly unlike the nonexistent legal relationship between Whatsapp and Brazil.
Some countries will have bilateral agreements to obtain evidence from abroad - a process on how e.g. Brazil law enforcement could cooperate with USA law enforcement to get a request that has some legal force in USA (and vice versa). In the absence of that, a provider should side with their users privacy and ignore foreign requests as a policy.
That's because they are British. No, seriously.
Some countries have most favored nation status in diplomatic and economic affairs. As a result, if you piss off the wrong partner nation then you will get stomped on locally.
Brazil doesn't. So the US is not going to force the whatsapp guys to do shit.
The company is free to chose not to operate in their country. It can chose to not answer to any official /judicial question (I'm not even saying agree with, only answer). It can do so even if it concerns a citizen of the country in question.
But if it does all that, it cannot expect said country to let them operate their business freely on "their soil", and that it is on the Internet does not change that, it's still accessing the Brazilian market.
I'm not agreeing with what Brazil is doing here, but I don't like the "I'm not on your soil so I can ignore you and still operate on your market" logic.
Because VPN services do not exist in or are not accessible from Brazil?
http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/16/brazils-congress-has-shut-d...
Can Signal be taken down like WhatsApp if the same happens again in the future?
In principle, since both the Signal client and server are FLOSS, it should be possible to resist a block in some ways that might not be so easy with for example Whatsapp, but as far as I can tell, as things stand right now there is no built-in way to switch server, and asking millions of regular people to make changes to the source code of their cellphone software, recompile and manually reinstall does not seem like a recipe for success. I wonder if one might sensibly work around these things by fallback/optional connection to the server through Tor if Tor is available on the device?
It sit on the top of a close-source browser...
[0]: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/26/googles_not_listenin...
And I am! I can't wait for Novena! Also notice a difference. Having a close-sourced CPU is different than having a close-source browser which has much more possibilities to compromise you. It can start camera, microphone, read disk files, locate you and transmit everything to "cloud".
The hard problem of messaging has not been solved yet, what people should build is a service like iMessage but with the public key pool per account publicly auditable and verifiable.
It reminds me a bit of the CAP-theorem: Security, Device Sync and Usability. Pick two.
My personal preference is solving DU, because I can do security aware stuff with GPG.
The problem is that the key pool is in Apple's hands. You cannot guarantee that they don't go and add a key do the pool and get all your messages anyways.
Seems like a low effort solution and would not satisfy my requirements, but it probably works for some people.
Edit: just verified. Phone is in flight mode and chatting away on signal-desktop works just fine.
[0]: https://gist.github.com/TheBlueMatt/d2fcfb78d29faca117f5
1) Your keys are safe (device was encrypted and/or you've wiped it remotely, whatever). In such situation you could be able to transfer keys from S-Desktop to new mobile. AFAIK there is no such functionality yet (remember, its Beta).
2) Your keys are not safe. In such case no recovery is possible. Notify all contacts about the fact that they should "reset secure session", forgetting your Signal identity and establish new Signal identity.
Anyway, this is the only solution on market with secure chats and multi-device sync.
I basically don't need other communicators right now for close family and part of my friends.
Occasional video call can be made using other platforms.
That unnecessary limitation really disgusts me, since I am the type who deletes his whole chat history weekly because I don't want to carry it around with me in case of another targeted stealing attempt. I'd love to integrate my whatsapp xmpp account into pidgin.
I've never used multi-device sync, ever. Not on iMessage, Viber, WhatsApp, ... The only one that I use across devices is Skype, but I don't use it except for video.
Sadly at the moment that's only WhatsApp and Telegram to some extent. If only there would be some protocol or standard that would allow me to communicate across different providers.
But unfortunately such a standard must be technologically impossible, otherwise it would be implemented and widespread already.
They just want a pretty GUI, their friends to be on it, and an easy way to send videos/photos/voicemails/whatever.
Granted, I've never wanted to send videos and sending photos works well on Signal right now. But until recently the GUI wasn't very polished.
In fact, Brazil's most popular chatting app that is recently banned there doesn't have multi-device sync. Hangouts does. Everyone could use hangouts, but not nearly as many people do.
Multi-device sync and privacy-awareness both are maybe reasons for a few individuals to switch but they both have problem with the number one feature of messengers: actually reaching other people.
Why something gets adopted is way more dependent on soft factors than on technical factors, as long as the basic requirements are satisfied.
Huh? I don't think this is correct. WhatsApp is huge in Europe, nearly everyone I meet prefers to use WhatsApp over SMS yet almost everybody has "unlimited SMS" plans.
I know only 1 guy who uses Signal and he is an AT&T systems administrator and linux addict. He understands the difference. The rest, use either iMessage or Telegram and don't really care about the rest.
To be honest, privacy in a general-purpose messaging app is the least of my concerns, as I have other means of sending important messages to select people. What is really annoying about Whatsapp is its extreme device dependence* which forces me to depend on a single device for casual chat with friends, family and acquaintances (and not the most comfortable use one) when multi-device messenger apps have been around for more than a decade. Telegram is like a return to sanity in this respect, so any news about Telegram invading Whatsapp's space are great news to me.
*I say "extreme" because Whatsapp doesn't even like if you switch your SIM card from one phone to another. It's insane. I used to have two phones (one for regular use and a cheap old one for activities where it could get damaged easily) and I had to give that up because Whatsapp would force me to re-register every time I made the swap.
You know you have to do that only once yes?
What I'd love is if they could also make it an email client too. Letting me send/receive insecure emails or (if the recipient has Signal) encrypted email using the same key management. I'd much prefur to give out an email address (totally in my control) than a phone number (could be taken away from me at any moment).
One digital communication app please.
Even if WhatsApp weren't using end to end encryption by default, they would have no way of complying with government requests like this one, because they simply don't have the messages. Telegram, on the other hand, is a surveillance dream.
My understanding of the Whatsapp end-to-end-encryption is that the use of the term is completely misleading, as the "ends" they are referring to are the client and the Whatsapp server (https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/general/21864047). Unless you know otherwise, I take that to mean the communications are in the clear at Facebook, and in my estimation that's tantamount to piping them straight into the US surveillance machinery through whatever they call PRISM these days, or some more or less distant relative of it. (This arrangement would still offer protection from bad actors that don't have some form of easy access to Facebook's internal information).
Both seem like dreadful options in absolute terms, but if we're comparing I'd slightly rather have that user base in the hands of someone possibly sincere and incompetent than with someone competent but almost certainly treacherous. At least there is a sliver of hope for improvement and, who knows, maybe once they're off the paved road of Whatsapp they'll wobble their way though other alternatives to something like Signal eventually.
Since we're fortunate enough to have you here anyway, would you mind commenting on how Signal would fare under a similar blockade? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10750898
Would the service be taken down? Do you consider it a priority to try making it difficult to block in the default configuration?
That structure seems enlightening to understanding how Telegram has been able to create clients for so many operating systems in a relatively short time.
"In face of the constitutional principles, it does not seem reasonable that millions of users are affected in result of the company (whatsapp) inertia"
In portuguese:
"""em face dos princípios constitucionais, não se mostra razoável que milhões de usuários sejam afetados em decorrência da inércia da empresa"
The judge also said that a fine would be more appropriate.
source (in portuguese): http://g1.globo.com/tecnologia/noticia/2015/12/whatsapp-just...
It seems like we've taken a step back in technology.
And this is quite interesting because Argentina is becoming the new Venezuela (at least they were, but few weeks ago they had elections and the left wing lost). And Venezuela clearly is becoming the new Cuba.
"Venezuela clearly is becoming the new Cuba": Not content merely with wrecking the economy, leadership squashes all opposition and turns country into a straight-up dictatorship (of the proletariat!)
Fortunately both statements are hyperbolic, as both countries have just held reasonably fair elections where the electorates decided to kick the bums out, but there are still choppy waters ahead...
Venezuela just officialized a huge change in direction with a complete majority for opposition in parliament. Argentina has just elected an opposition president that is already undoing the policies of the previous governments.
Now, I'm also Brazilian, and, of course have more detailed info about here than those countries. I've never been so optimist about our country. You know, I've watched the TV news yesterday (I guess first time in the year), and 2/3 of it was about the president's impeachment or criminal persecution of corrupt politicians/businesspeople. Yesterday there was nobody thrown into jail, but just last week there were 11.
You know, those people didn't start yesterday. Corruption was smaller before the current government, but those businesspeople now in jail have been living from government contracts since before the military coup. Some of the politicians now in jail have been in power since the military government.
This is Hacker News, not Reddit, lets keep it that way, ok?
What I don't get is why mobile carriers still charge for SMS. They could have all deployed their own SMS apps with ads/premium where you could write messages for free. Some did that, but rather badly I think. They just let that market go.
Now, there's so little work done in reverse-engineering IM protocols. It's really sad. Part of this is because Sean Egan got hired by Google to work on Hangouts, so he's out of the reverse-engineering game for good, and it's sad that nobody took up the mantle from him.
Three of the major phone operators (Vivo, Claro, TIM) implemented the ban, while the fourth (Oi), did not. The CEO of Vivo, one of the major phone operators, came out a couple of months ago saying that WhatsApp is "piracy", since they are not affected by the same regulations as the normal phone operator.[1]
[1]: http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/2015/08/1666187-whatsap... (portuguese)
Also, if you've designed a system like this, could you also design one where you'd be unable to comply with the shutdown order? I suppose one of the Bitcoin related message services would be like that.
This boils down to the fact (for me, and by proxy, my community) that I (and by proxy, my community) will not use insecure communication because someone or someones wants me to do so.
Shake your fist, rattle your sabres, put me in your sights, it will not change my (and by proxy, my community's) resolve.
And if I (and by proxy, my community) is to be prosecuted for using secure channels, then I (and by proxy, my community) will resort to steganography. Exact circumstances aside, there's no getting around the effects of a dedicated mind and an overwhelming power (of math) on my communications' transit.
The only means by which a paternal element can mediate the policies of my interactions would be to mediate the interface by which I (and by proxy, my community) communicate (in this case -- electronic/digital computer<->human), and enforce this with vigilant, and economically costly violence.
This matter-of-factness is similar to that in traffic stop interactions. I'm not happy that men with guns can systematically stop my transit, search my belongings, and steal my assets (at least in Texas), with ex post facto logic applied to the inherent justice, and I have no way of stopping this. The exact circumstances aside, there's no getting around the effects of a dedicated mind and an overwhelming power on my transit.
So I work around it, I try not to get stopped, and I deal with it when I do get stopped. I don't shake my fist or pout, beyond for the benefit of opening doubt in the minds of those ignorant of the underlying physical process.
Your comment history says otherwise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4167143
Seem to be a run of the mill dev to me. I'm surprised you got as many credulous responses as you did.
1. An elected Judge in Brazil also has a side business of running a marginal tourism website and the time to comment on HN
2. Someone is lying on the internet
Also, there's always a fine line with appeal to authority with regards to experts, which you would hope a judge would be in the field of law. For instance, is it folly to point to consensus in science? That is, after all, nothing but an authority.
I believe there is a lot of evidence of autocratic regimes like Russia and China paying people to promote anti-US views. Who knows if this guy is one of them or what Stalin called a "useful idiot" but its amusing to see obvious trolling in action. Did he think no one would go through his posting history?
On HN, we start from the benefit of the doubt. A person can be both a programmer and a judge. pqdbr's comment was coherent and plausible. The null hypothesis is therefore that pqdbr is making a valuable contribution.
It's fine and interesting to look through someone's comment history for background. It can also be ok to ask questions based on that, but this is always delicate and must be done respectfully. But to dig around for a bit, leap to a sinister conclusion, and fling it at them with a couple insults for good measure is a serious violation of civility on this site.
HN members with outlier backgrounds (and 'judge' certainly is one) are some of the most valuable contributors we have; doubly so—if not more—when they speak computing too. Imagine what it would feel like to share from one's expertise in the most on-topic way possible, only to be randomly slapped in the face and have your character impugned. You owe pqdbr a lot more of an apology than "Cool! Always happy to be wrong when evidence supports it." (Edit: which, now that I think of it, reads more like a humblebrag than making amends.)
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10751003 and marked it off-topic.
That said, my comment wasn't particularly harsh and I think it's reasonable to be suspect of such lofty claims, especially with basically no proof to be found anywhere in a cursory search. One commenter did some serious research to find Portuguese language proof and that is why this was even an issue.
Had the commenter been full of BS, which is the overwhelming majority in these cases, nobody would have made much of a fuss about it.
I also expressed my gratitude for pointing out the errant conclusion to the other poster who did research, so I have no problem admitting a false conclusion. Being wrong with a lot of support (upvotes) seems to be my primary sin here.
Outrage and drama drive more upvotes than intellectual curiosity does. That's why upvotes, though vital, are not the final arbiter here. HN is a constitutional democracy, and what you did was unconstitutional. Please don't do it again.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/057c1240-a40f-11e5-b73f-95454...
Anti-technology culture tells a lot about an economy, group or nation.
The alternative here was an outdated SMS communication (telecoms in Brazil are so terrible they make Verizon look good).
I'd then call the developers "psychopaths" because they don't understand the harm done by drug smugglers.