755
A federal agent said WhatsApp's encryption is a lie. Then the investigation was shut down
(www.techspot.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
755 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
84256 readers
3058 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The easiest implementation of this is that the recipient of an infringing message flags it from its local client. At that point it’s not encrypted if their claim of e2ee is true.
It also means that only parties involved in the message exchange can flag / report them.
Corporations are often not so monolithic ; the guys doing abuse are likely not the one who try to milk users (looking at you marketing).
I don't want to defend whatsapp, but if messages are actually properly end to end encrypted, but one of the recipients (one of the ends) knowingly shares it (e.g. with the report function), that is still end to end encryption.
don't be surprised if signal or matrix implements this. I'm strongly against scanning messages, but if the recipient willfully decides so, they should be able to share a message with moderators. that would be an actual tool against actual pedophiles, and scammers.
but this can only work safely if the client is not sending the decrypted message, because it could modify it, but instead it sends the decryption keys for it. both signal and matrix are regularly rotating the keys, so it wouldn't grant the moderators to read all messages, but it would grant them the ability to see what was actually sent. with that the client should also show how far into the past messages will be revealed to moderators, so they can decide if that's ok for them.
Yup we agree on that. This pattern is actually the most sensible approach to support privacy. Whatever happens in transmission.