WhatsApp is joining Apple’s lawsuit against the UK Government’s efforts to backdoor Advanced Data Protection. The secreative nature of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal means that this is probably one of the few public developments we can hear about in this case.
WhatsApp on Wednesday announced it was seeking to intervene in a legal case between Apple and the British government regarding whether the iPhone maker can be forced to retain access to the content of its users’ iCloud accounts in order to comply with legal warrants.
It follows a judgment back in April when the Investigatory Powers Tribunal — the only court in the country that can hear certain national security cases — confirmed that Apple was suing the British government over the secret legal order.
WhatsApp’s chief, Will Cathcart, stated the Meta-owned messaging app had “applied to intervene in this case to protect people’s privacy globally.”
“Liberal democracies should want the best security for their citizens. Instead, the UK is doing the opposite through a secret order. This case could set a dangerous precedent and embolden nations to try to break the encryption that protects people’s private communication.
“WhatsApp would challenge any law or government request that seeks to weaken the encryption of our services and will continue to stand up for people’s right to a private conversation online,” stated Cathcart.
I don’t trust META… Either they’re doing it for publicity and whitewashing, or because the only one allowed to hold keys to backdoors must be USA deep state.
@KevPham#Apple will lose because of how much power they have granted to the #UK and #EU already.
THIS is why it is important to fight against abuses of power when they start, not when they offend you. #Apple has cowtowed to European authoritarianism time and time again, what's one more time?
The business reason I have seen speculated is that Meta/WhatsApp do not want to be generally held responsible for illegal content exchanged and distributed on their platforms.
If it is unencrypted, they need to invest much more heavily in measures to curb, moderate or prevent criminal content at scale on their platforms.
If it is encrypted from their perspective, they can scale down the costs by making it someone else’s problem (client-side scanning/iCloud/Drive/user reporting).
I would have thought that e2ee being a core feature would be a god enough reason. You don’t have to read any altruistic motives into it. It’s one of their key selling points.
Good to see this. Breaking E2EE with flimsy government backdoors means utterly annihilating both the security and privacy of everyone in the country. The British public shouldn’t have to learn this lesson the hard way at the cost of idiotic out-of-touch lawmakers.
It is good to see tech firms standing up for the reasonable position here and trying to talk some sense into the government. The UK has tried this nonsense since David Cameron and the 2010s and the politicians seem to be banking on public weariness to slip it through, so it’s good to stand our ground.
