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I'd be interested in hearing WhatsApp's response to this.

Or moxie's, for that matter. He's been contacted by the Saudi government before and publicly turned down their offers to be complicit in their human rights violations. (He also wrote the encryption that WhatsApp uses.)

https://moxie.org/blog/saudi-surveillance/

More importantly, can anyone independently verify this? :)

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I have no special insight, but it's a fact that SA drops VoIP traffic. The UX for that is pretty bad, calls fail to connect by timing out after 5min or whatever, and people are left trying over and over again or waiting around hoping the call will connect. I think it could make sense to short circuit that process and display an immediate error to the caller that lets them know this call just isn't going to work.

The author's suggestion that it's impossible for SA to block VoIP without blocking messaging is incorrect.

Verification is not that complicated. 1- Find someone outside of KSA with a +966 number 2- Try 3- See if it works

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