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Comment by jeidz | Hacker News Reader

Does this mean that WhatsApp is secure or that this particular agency didn’t care enough to break the encryption?

No, they were fined because bankers must only communicate via channels that are monitored. By using whatsapp, they bypass all the internal and external audit/compliance teams.

unknown. seems like they were being punished because their employees used whatsapp for business communication, not that it was discovered the employees used whatsapp and did something illegal

If WhatsApp encryption can be broken, there is no way the agencies capable of doing so would share it with the lowly SEC. That would be a top level state secret.

On top of that I assume that the NSA (mostly) still has a PRISM-like programme in place, it would be foolish to assume otherwise. More exactly I do think that they (NSA and some other agencies) still have direct access to the servers of Google, MS, Facebook and Apple.

But I 100% agree with you, such lowly use-cases like the SEC chasing some bankers don't register on NSA's (and similar agencies') radar, it's only money, after all, I think they're more interested in dealings involving power itself.

The SEC is pretty much a nobody when it comes to 3-letter agencies. See how Elon Musk challenges them publicly and all he got in return was a slap on the wrist.

On a related note, the major issue with the SEC as highlighted by every knowledgeable commenter is that they have a revolving door shared with the same banks and organizations they are supposed to monitor. People leave SEC and join Goldman Sachs or JPM and then when new administrators come in they rejoin the SEC. It’s corruption at an unprecedented level.

> See how Elon Musk challenges them publicly and all he got in return was a slap on the wrist.

Publicly challenging them is not illegal or even bad so that seems reasonable.

He got much more than a slap on the wrist, he go removed from his chairman incestuous position from Tesla. It's the first red flag of bad governance when the CEO is also the chairman (others are to have the board full of family members and overly paid sycophants, I let you google who s on Tesla board).

This will eventually be the starting point of a very slow reform at Tesla, so not a bad deal.

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