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
Kinda, sorta, but no, not really. What's happening is that the recipient is decrypting the message. When you report the message, you include a cleartext copy with your report.
The "switch" you are talking about is in the same app that is doing the decryption. For the bad actor to toggle that "switch", they would have to control the app.
Are you talking about physical control? Regardless, it's closed-source... There is nothing that says they can't also generate the keys on the other end that they had your devices generate. Outside of open source code that's buildable from source, they can claim whatever they want about lack of access to switches.
Technically true.
However, doing so would be perpetrating a fraud. If they denied the capability you're talking about in response to a warrant or subpoena, someone would be in contempt.
I don't know if any corpo actually cares about such things, but I know that if you or I were to do this, we'd quickly find ourselves broke and possibly in prison.
But my point is that Meta is committing fraud against the public for advertising WhatsApp as E2EE when it's not, as per this entire post...
There is no indication that they can actually acquire the clear text of an E2EE communicatiom. without one of the ends being complicit in the process. There is no evidence of the fraud you refer to.
That doesn't mean they are telling the truth, merely that they haven't been proven to have lied. They could release their source code tomorrow. That code could prove you are correct and they are liars. That code could prove that they are correct, and you were wrong.
We don't have to resort to unfounded claims to justify criticism here. Proving their claims to be unverifiable is more damning than failing to prove they are committing fraud.
Hmm... true, fair! ∆