Attorney General William Barr wants to backdoor Facebook's WhatsApp

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/03/attorney-general-william-barr.html

“We are writing to request that Facebook does not proceed with its plan to implement end-to-end encryption across its messaging services without ensuring that there is no reduction to user safety.”

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90

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Bill Barr Back-ins? :thinking:

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Jared Kushner is not going to be happy about this!

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Quark:
It’s good to want things.

Odo:
Even things you can’t have?

Quark:
Especially things I can’t have.

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Barr is an advocate of covering up shady and illegal behaviour the old fashioned way. These new technologies make it too easy for everyone to do what he’s put decades of practise into doing.

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Another reason not to use Whats App

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Bill Barr barebacks whatsApp backdoor. :rofl:

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Barr (and everyone reading this should) probably just

#DELETEFACEBOOK
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and encourage their friends and family to

#DELETEFACEBOOK
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I think Barr has bigger more personal issues to think about right now than trying to spy on whatsapp.

Like, how to stay out of jail.

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Is there any feasible way this could be accomplished?

I know the morals and reasonableness and appropriateness of this are all out the window. But technically?

BC I can’t think of a way that the FBI/CIA/etc could have access to break encryption without Other Evil Entities being able to take advantage of same access.

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Why, the Unicorn Pass of course.

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Barr’s not the only surveillance fetishist complaining about this move:

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This hobby horse has been ridden time and time again and the answer is always the same, you can’t make a exclusive backdoor for just law enforcement. Five minutes after creation hackers will have found it, cracked it and put out there for the internet to see.
Furthermore, any social media that tries this invites themselves to go the way of MySpace and a new app will take its place that and 5 years later the government will get around to asking for a backdoor for that and the cycle continues.

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A point Apple kept making to the FBI when a backdoor was demanded into iMessage and iOS.

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Thank you all for confirming that my vague understanding of cryptography is not a total Mis-understanding!

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