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Comment by coolspot | Hacker News Reader

BTW does anyone know how Viber and WhatsApp (both are very popular there) operating in Russia?

Do they cooperate?

WhatsApp cant cooperate by design they don't have the keys although they do have some metadata, not sure about Viber.

My understanding is that law requires backdoor access [111], you cannot just shrug it off as "we are end-to-end" encrypted. You must have a backdoor or not allowed to operate in Russia.

[111] http://news.softpedia.com/news/russia-wants-encryption-backd...

Maybe they could provide access to the phones data though. In more or less the same way WhatsApp Web works.

How do we know WhatsApp doesn't cooperate? It's closed source, and owned by Facebook no less, so how can we know there's no backdoor?

You can analyse the traffic data being sent by the App, also there are third party Apps that work on the WhatsApp network.

You can maybe verify that the app doesn't currently send messages anywhere, but what if there's a way for Facebook to send a request to WhatsApp for a dump of all messages within a date range?

Viber and WhatsApp are integrated into Russian lawful intercept (I know, right) since November 2016. Skype since 2013.

They are supposed to do that or they are cooperating? How does it work? The local binary uploads encryption keys? The server tells the client to disable e2e?

There are public reports[1] that they are refusing to comply with similar requests eg in the UK.

[1] who knows what goes on behind closed doors... https://news.sky.com/story/whatsapp-denies-government-access...

For a long time e2e was optional in the messengers, not sure when the transition happened exactly. Jurisdiction user databases with contact lists, location data and like are accessible either way.

You made a bold claim; do you have an ounce of evidence to back it up?

Source?

They do, this is discussed many times on russian tech sites as fact by experts.

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