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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

If WhatsApp breaks E2E in Europe every other country will jump on the bandwagon.

WhatsApp is hardly safe from prying eyes anyway.

Sure, there's always-on E2E encryption that is really well designed. However, WhatsApp constantly prompts every user to back up to the cloud, which is much less well secured.

Thus, it's pretty trivial for the authorities to get to it there, I'm sure they can get into iCloud and Google Drive if they want to. It only takes one person in the conversation to have this option switched on. I think this is why WhatsApp doesn't get so much flak from the authorities for having good E2E encryption.

Those are unrelated issues which also switch the burden to your cloud storage service provider in this case Google or Apple.

This isn’t part of the threat model we are discussing here.

Which is to say WhatsApp is perfectly secure as long as the hostile actor cannot access the WhatsApp backups. Only nation state actors might be able to do that.

Isn't it more like "literally any LEO or pseudo-LEO in a 'friendly' country" at this point based on what we know at this point?

I think the threat model here is less about a hostile actor subverting the backups than the extreme ease of access to all data on those systems that is given to law enforcement?

Yes but as a user you don't control this. That's the problem. Anyone you're talking to can activate cloud backups and there is no way to know.

or until LEO or State Security compels / sidepushes a trojan app update via play store update. It's as trivial as that. Or just tap the baseband chip via the provider.

>Only nation state actors might be able to do that.

Nah, all it takes is a good spear phishing campaign like the iCloud celebrity nudes leak a few years ago

Whatsapp was just an example. There are other messengers out there and also the Email with SMIME and PGP is possibly affected.

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