You can be sure there is already a team working on the architectural changes needed to implement lawful intercept and passive surveillance on Wickr. This is what happens when a secure platform gets too big. The same thing happened to Skype.
Increasingly, end-to-end cryptography is what customers expect. We also use end-to-end cryptography in other Amazon systems, most recently including Ring doorbells - https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360054941511-Unde...
I can't trust AWS will be truthful about their crypto systems and lack of backdoors.
[0] - https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/13571435600055091...
Invite a bad actor into the building in order to keep bad actors out.
Invite bad actor into the building?
Hmm, maybe not.
[0] https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/08/04/is-extended-random-ma...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/18/amazon...
Amazon has zero recourse in this situation, neither would they risk their gov contracts fighting it.
Amazon has plenty of recourse, and they've been fighting gag orders for years now. Ex: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/microsoft-amazon...
The company leading that charge: Microsoft. The company that got the huge JEDI DoD cloud contract: Microsoft. Weird, huh?
The beauty of Wickr is it provided disposable identities and relatively strong anonymity, and fended off bulk interception using an end to end security protocol. The market for it was smaller because while everyone says they want security, I found that the risk/reward of anonymity is too risky for most people. The people I knew who did use Wickr were political staffers and operatives/activists on campaigns, law enforcement, and other fields where they had official recourse to protection.
The reason for AMZN to buy Wickr is that it is a trustworthy secure messenger product with a valuable and influential user base, and an evolution of the product without anonymity is probably the case for growth.
I don't see it being backdoored so much as just adapted to leverage its existing user base to fill out a feature need in a suite of AWS collaboration tools that will compete against Teams/Github, Zoom, Atlassian, etc.
Or, rather, the reason is they turned all that into a platform:
To be fair, this is the fairy-tale that's told on every acquisition. I'm pretty certain this same narrative was spun even when facebook acquired occulus.
Not saying this will be similar, but just hearing those words is not assuring by itself.
Regardless of any promise, professed dismay, warranty, or other statement by Amazon, this product is no longer a trustworthy interface for private communications. The mere presence of the company brings such high probability of capitulation to government or corporate eavesdroppers that it's basically a useless asset to own IMPO.
You can make it weaker without getting rid of it. Whatsapp also has E2EE on the message contents, does it stop Facebook from sharing all your contacts, call metadata, message times etc with the authorities? Very unlikely.
Also, metadata.