Indian Government Still Doesn’t Understand How Encryption Works After Fourteen Years ▉

Russell Brandom for Rest of World.org:

For nearly 10 years, WhatsApp’s chat messages have been end-to-end encrypted, meaning they can’t be read by anyone except the sender and the receiver. Drawing on an open-source encryption system developed by Signal, WhatsApp began the move shortly after it was acquired by Facebook in 2014. For the most part, its encryption has been running quietly in the background ever since. There have been legal challenges, but for the world’s largest source of end-to-end encrypted communications, the past decade has been remarkably drama-free.

But WhatsApp is currently in the middle of its biggest legal challenge yet — and it’s a serious one. IT rules passed by India in 2021 require services like WhatsApp to maintain “traceability” for all messages, allowing authorities to follow forwarded messages to the “first originator” of the text.

In a Delhi High Court proceeding last Thursday, WhatsApp said it would be forced to leave the country if the court required traceability, as doing so would mean breaking end-to-end encryption. It’s a common stance for encrypted chat services generally, and WhatsApp has made this threat before — most notably in a protracted legal fight in Brazil that resulted in intermittent bans. But as the Indian government expands its powers over online speech, the threat of a full-scale ban is closer than it’s been in years.

This is the second time India has tried this. It tried this fourteen years ago and while RIM did get around the ban by setting up data centers in Mumbai, I can’t see the same working for WhatsApp. That also isn’t the same as handing over encryption keys that don’t exist.

It’s almost like the Indian government (or any government for that matter) simply doesn’t understand how end-to-end encryption works. There is no back door and creating one breaks the security and encryption for all. It’s not something that can be localized to India. This would impact users all over the world.

It’s not clear how the courts will respond to WhatsApp’s ultimatum, but they’ll have to take it seriously. WhatsApp is used by more than half a billion people in India — not just as a chat app, but as a doctor’s office, a campaigning tool, and the backbone of countless small businesses and service jobs. There’s no clear competitor to fill its shoes, so if the app is shut down in India, much of the digital infrastructure of the nation would simply disappear. Being forced out of the country would be bad for WhatsApp, but it would be disastrous for everyday Indians.

That’s not an exaggeration either. WhatsApp is not just the default chat app in India, its the chat app in India. Everything happens on WhatsApp. Everything. Disastrous is an understatement.

Reached for comment, a Meta representative emphasized WhatsApp’s central role in India’s digital economy. “We remain committed to safeguarding the privacy of our users which is integral to India’s digital growth and progress,” the company said in a statement.

Strange times when I agree with Facebook Meta.

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