Huge privacy and security show down brewing: the Trump admin is secretly demanding Facebook break the end to end encryption in its Messenger voice callshttps://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-encryption-exclusive/u-s-government-seeks-facebook-help-to-wiretap-messenger-sources-idUSKBN1L226D …
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One thing I don't fully understand about this story: As far as I can tell, Facebook has never publicly said all Messenger calls are end-to-end encrypted. They've had a E2E feature for Messenger since 2016 called 'secret conversations', but it is opt in and seems to be text only
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I just spent like a half hour googling around, trying to find any public statement from Facebook saying phone calls in Messenger are end-to-end encrypted. Plenty of stuff on opt-in 'secret conversations' texts. But can't find anything on voice calls.
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Of course, WhatsApp -- also owned by Facebook -- has had end-to-end encrypted phone calls by default for a while. But as far as I can discern, they've never publicly made that claim about Messenger too.
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So either a) there is something wrong in the Reuters story, or b) Facebook had an important security feature turned on for hundreds of millions of users and didn't tell anyone?
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or I guess c) I'm wrong and Facebook made an obscure announcement at some point in the past that I cannot find
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My bet was (until Alec's tweet) something WebRTC based that didn't validate the cert sent by the other end. So they can argue it's encrypted but it's also bypassable and they're hoping no one brings that up... If you have secret conversations though, easy to validate the cert..
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