A 10-month Commerce Department probe concluded Meta could view all WhatsApp messages in unencrypted form
Here’s the original reporting, instead of another website’s summary of Bloomberg’s actual report:
So it sounds like the agent was investigating allegations, from content moderation contractors, that Meta could access the contents of WhatsApp messages, and came to the conclusion that yes, Meta could.
There are a few possibilities here.
- Meta does have full plain text access to all Whatsapp messages, but guards that access very closely. Although the clients seem to generate E2EE keys for each session, somehow they’re leaking those keys to Meta’s servers somewhere, and the closed source code sufficiently hides that so that there’s no whistleblower or security researcher able to detect this definitively.
- Meta has a secret wiretap functionality where they can compromise the E2EE keys somehow, but uses it only for narrow cases. This helps keep the functionality secret, because security researchers and other reviewers may never see the functionality in action.
- Meta allows users to report objectionable content in the threads they’re already part of. The reporting function either forwards the E2EE key itself, or all the plaintext data, that gives content moderators access to the underlying message contents. The contractor whistleblowers and the federal agent investigating these allegations simply got it wrong, and misunderstood the technical process of how the plaintext messages end up in the content moderator’s possession.
Meta claims that it’s #3. They acknowledge they have plaintext access to messages when a party to the thread presses the report button.
This unnamed federal agent believes it’s #1, after 10 months of investigation, and sent out an email to other investigators that they should look into that possibility.
I’m skeptical of #1, simply because I don’t believe that conspiracies to keep that kind of stuff secret can be maintained. It’s not just that there would be technically skilled whistleblowers who have actual access to the code (not the non-technical content moderator contractors who review the content), but a weakness in such an important and widely used protocol would attract all sorts of hackers, state sponsored or otherwise.
But option #2 might explain everything we’ve seen so far. Full wiretap capability that is rarely used and very tightly controlled.
“The claim that WhatsApp can access people’s encrypted communications is patently false,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said. He added that the bureau had already “disavowed this purported investigation, calling its own employee’s allegations unsubstantiated.”
I can’t help but notice that in response to people’s concern that Meta may be able to read people’s messages, the Meta spokesperson responds that WhatsApp can’t read them. A little bit of administrative juggling on Meta’s end so that the team with access to the messages doesn’t fall within the WhatsApp department, and both claims could be true.
But Facebook/“Meta” would never lie.
Oopsie! Hang on, they even lie to lawmakers in case buying them off fails? Bummer!
Seriously: this company needs to be scoured from the face of the earth.
I work at Meta and interface with WhatsApp enough to know a couple things. First of all, data is encrypted at rest; that’s not even a WhatsApp thing, that’s literally how our infra works (it’s actually an efficiency thing, since deletions requires only deleting the key). So the “source” of the article saying
“Meta can and does view and store all the text messages, photographs, audio and video recordings” in an unencrypted format.
Is either lying or wrong.
Second of all, the encryption is legit. The only time “Meta employees” and “Contractors” are seeing your message content is when someone reports your message; because the person reporting it is sending a decrypted copy.
It may be true that there is some sort of device-level backdoor on your phone, or possibly that there’s a remote switch of some sort to send a second copy of the message in decrypted format for some targets, but I have not heard or seen this.
Fyi I use Signal and not WhatsApp, but in general I don’t think this article holds much weight
Well who creates the keys and who stores them? That’s all you need to have a back door.
The client does, AKA your phone
I dont believe you.
Ok
What I don’t understand yet is why there haven’t been any independent cybersecurity experts capable of finding a backdoor in WhatsApp. How hard would it be for an expert without access to the source code to find one? Are any independent entities monitoring WhatsApp’s security at all??
The clients are one question, but the servers are another. If the backdoor is on the server end, which it sure looks like, then your experts won’t find anything by examining the client.
I see. I thought that the backdoor had to be in the client, because I thought that could be the only place where the private keys are stored, but I’ve since realized that it could be on the server. Thanks for the insight.
It’s not about being vulnerable. It’s probably a very tight software.
It’s just that Meta stores the private keys of the e2e encryption. So they can decrypt any and all chats if they want to.
Ooh, I see. Thanks.
Hey I work in cyber security. Just because an app has a backdoor doesn’t mean that the backdoor can be accessed by anyone. Accessing this backdoor would likely mean compromising meta themselves, not just the app or its communications.
I’m sure you must receive lots of annoying questions because of the work you do, so thanks a lot for the insight!
The fact that Trump’s own goon uses Signal and not WhatsApp should probably tell you all you need to know about using WhatsApp.
Yes, not to mention that their security breach on Signal was of their own making. Some moron invited a member of the press to their chat. XD
No. Shit.
People who say Facebook (now Meta) paid $21 billion (with a B) for WhatsApp to be charitable. Even though the original creators have distanced themselves from it after the acquisition.
Fun fact: every forum running phpBB, Invision, or vBulletin (as in, traditional Internet forums) can read your DMs in plaintext. They’re unencrypted in the SQL database. However, the forum’s Admin Control Panel (ACP) does not provide this functionality. All three have mods that add it in. So imagine you run a forum. You have a hidden forum where only your mods and admins can interact. No one else can even see it. You could have a whole other one that is just all the DMs. I’m not sure about social networks. But I know if you have command-line access to the SQL database, you can query a user and see everything that user has put in the database. Public messages… and private ones. So a lot of the forums started saying “Personal messages” or “Direct messages” instead of “Private messages” because they were never private.
Disbelieve anyone who says they can’t see your private or personal messages.
I can confirm this, I used to run several phpbb and (pirated) vbulletin juggalo forums and when I found out this was possible I read everyone’s DMs for funzies.
Lotttts of requests for noodz.
Pirated vBulletin. I sure didn’t have the sack for that. I figure, pirated software running on a server, especially if it’s not your hardware (and self hosting wasn’t an option for me back then) is kind of dangerous.
When I found out I could get at the DMs in an Invision board I was running for a minute, I made a post letting everyone know, and worked it into the thing you agree to when you sign up. I made it clear that I wasn’t good with SQL and it wasn’t easy to read them, but that I did have that access and to not use our DMs for anything you wouldn’t want someone to be able to see.
I assume most of the noods requests were from the juggaloes to the juggalettes exclusively? Or did it go both ways? Never cared much for ICP, though “The Amazing Jekyll Brothers” had some cool songs on it (“Everybody Rize,” “I Stab People,” “Mad Professor,” and maybe a couple others)… but the fandom? Absolutely wild. Even if I thought ICP straight up sucked, I’d have to admit the fandom is awesome.
I sorta recently (couple years ago) learned that some US states actually brand juggaloes a gang. Like it’s illegal to be one. That’s wild to me. I don’t think Deadheads ever got the same treatment, and, same thing, different genre.
When it was personal forums with low traffic mostly just for friends I never had any trouble, but the couple times I pirated vBulletin for larger, more popular sites, we’d get warning emails within a couple months and have to stop or face a lawsuit.
Honestly juggalos are, not unanimously, but more often than not, pretty sex-positive and severely lacking in shame or social inhibition, so the requests honestly went both ways, though typically initiated by the dudes.
Thanks for your kind words about my people 😊 - Yea, actually it was the FBI who decided to nationally declare us a “loosely organized hybrid-gang”, which is in some ways worse than just being classified as a gang, because it meant that all it took in some places, usually places with serious gang activity, was a bumper sticker or a t-shirt and you’d be assumed to be affiliated and thus severely harassed or arrested. Some people even temporarily lost custody of their kids over it.
It’s disgusting and baseless, and it never had any merit. There were some kids in Denver and other places with a big juggalo community and massive gang problem that decided to integrate juggalo culture and insignia into their local set, and for the FBI, that was enough. It’s like if, in the early 90s when Starter jackets started being used as gang symbols, if the FBI decided that anyone who was a Raiders fan was a fucking gang member. ICP tried to sue, with the help of the Michigan ACLU, and we even famously marched on Washington in 2014, but it never amounted to anything. To this day, in some areas, you can legally be removed from your life, thrown in jail, lose your job and your kids, put on a national gang member list, and be permanently labeled a felon just for owning a copy of Riddlebox.
Since you are a self proclaimed professional, what percentage of nude requests were answered positively, and is it as close to zero as I expect?
Honestly, it often went over better than you’d think. A lot of lettes like showing of their tits, and would want to see dick (and sometimes butt hole) in return!
Turns out building a community primarily focused on gathering people who are even further outcasted from poor white trash lends itself to a serious lack of inhibition and disregard for taboo.
The most important question to ask when evaluating end-to-end encryption: who manages the keys?
If Facebook manages all of the keys and is responsible for telling which public key belongs to who, then of course Facebook can read every message.
