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Comment by timkam | Hacker News Reader

The article somewhat suggests that the guy used the airport's wifi. In this case and assuming that the wifi network supports government surveillance by design, end-to-end encryption does not help.

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That is simply not correct. With properly implemented E2EE, you can communicate confidently over a completely insecure channel. You could post the entire data stream publicly on the internet with no loss of privacy.

Sorry, to refine my comment: what typical B2C messengers and social media apps sell as end-to-end encryption does not help. Is this correct?

No?

What do you dislike about current E2EE?

I would still assume that with apps like Snapchat, there are inherent problems on meta-level (from an E2EE view) because for the users, Snapchat is essentially a trusted third party, providing governance/management features. But it can well be that Snapchat does not provide E2EE; I cannot see any remarks about it on their webpage.

However, on the WhatsApp webpage, you can find the E2EE hand-waving that I was alluding to: https://faq.whatsapp.com/820124435853543

"WhatsApp _considers_ chats with businesses that use the WhatsApp Business app or manage and store customer messages themselves to be end-to-end encrypted."

And later, they write that in many cases, Meta can actually read the messages.

The entire point of TLS (let alone E2EE!) is to make something like this particular scenario safe.

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