UK locks horns with WhatsApp over threat to break encryption

politico.eu

16 points·grammers··6 comments

All communications of public office holders should be made public. Uncluding their private ones. Once this is done, we are okay with this law. Else, it's just not right. These people have the power to hide their own criminal acts.

Practically speaking unless Meta are willing to remove WhatsApp from the appstore for UK IPs and lay off all 5,000 staff at Kings Cross on principle, do they have any leverage?

Only removing it from the UK App Store would be necessary. Why would they need to lay anyone off? And yes I guess they are prepared to remove WhatsApp from the App Store. It would not be the first country to ban WhatsApp. It’s actually quite common for countries to ban WhatsApp in a tantrum and then unban it later when they calm down.

Why would they even need to remove it from the UK appstore?

The logical course of action would be for Whatsapp to remove all assets they have in the UK from the UK (so there is nothing the UK government can hold hostage to extract compliance) and then disregard UK law entirely. If the UK wants to block Whatsapp or order Google/Apple to make it unavailable in the UK they could do so, but they could then educate people on how to sideload it on Android devices (and support continued antitrust action against Apple for the appstore, etc.). If the UK government tries to block Whatsapp at the network level, Whatsapp could enhance their application to automatically work around this using Tor-style, Tor Bridge-style/obfsproxy/etc. or similar techniques.

looking at breadth and depth of surveillance circa 2013 (prism/xkeyscore), plus meta's track record i'm sceptical they don't already have access to it all

Meta should preemptively leave the UK until this disgrace of a bill is no longer being considered.

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