WhatsApp security
Technology and justice do not seem to be going through their best moment, at least in United States And it is the case ofFBI v. Apple, in which they try to access the iPhone of terrorist from San Bernardino to investigate without the protection of the terminal allowing it, is giving a lot to talk about. Is individual privacy more important than national security? Now it is WhatsApp the application that is in the eye of the hurricane, or at least in the eye of the US Department of Justice , since its security prevents eavesdropping.Will they get those responsible to create a back door for judges and other authorities to know all our secrets... for the common good?
The information comes from the newspaper The New York Times, who published this past weekend information about the intentions of the North American Department of Justice to carry out wiretapping in the famous messaging application And it is that a court would have given the green light to carry out this collect this information in a case that, on this occasion, would not be related to terrorism The problem lies in theWhatsApp protection More specifically in its encryption A security that cannot be bypassed and that would prevent proper development of the judicial investigation.
According to anonymous sources for the newspaper, federal officials were “discussing how to proceed in a criminal investigation in which a federal judge has approved a wiretap, but investigators were blocked by WhatsApp encryption”. Possibly, the federal authorities will propose the same strategy seen between the FBI and Apple, in which the creation of ais requested software or special program (back door) to access a certain terminal to carry out the intervention or tapping of conversations. However, the different parties involved seem unwilling to comment on this matter.
Now, the encryption or security of WhatsApp poses other problems These barriers were created in 2014 for Android (from summer 2015 also for iPhone) using encryption technology from user to user of the company Open Whisper System That is, only the interlocutor can know the content of the messages, also leaving out of the equation itself WhatsApp and its servers.Given this approach, WhatsApp does not store any content of the conversations. And even if it did, it couldn't decode the information and access the content either. Something that has led him to have recent problems with the Brazilian justice, which constantly requests information about certain people linked to drug trafficking, without WhatsApp being able to offer any information, since it does not have it.
Those responsible for WhatsApp and Facebook, the company owner, have already shown their support for Apple, betting on the privacy and security of the technology they develop Messages through the social network Facebook from Jan Koum ( WhatsApp) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) who claim to put at risk to all companies and users if one of these backdoors is created for their systems and services.Something that for the US authorities, including its president, Barack Obama, is a clear problem in terms of national security
