How could we find out? Do the reasons get leaked unofficially usually?

Which implies that later - through the power of delusions of grandeur - that it will become feasible.

IOW, as soon as backdoors are implemented. And we only have to lose this battle once.

Or will they decide to believe that the powers will not be used, and keep their service in operation?

Dear FT, WhatsApp is not a company, the owner of the WhatsApp service is Meta Inc., also the owner of Facebook and Instagram. (It is misleading to citizens that companies can hide behind the names of their acquisitions.)

Big Tech tends to have negative connotations, nowadays. So, here the FT is trying to say that a democratically elected government is living in fear of private firms.

While it may be true that our government are now living in fear of not just Big Tech but all types of Big whatever, the fight was way beyond just big tech. Sure Big Tech helped but it still is a badly written and badly thought out think-about-the-children type law that was being fought by everyone not just big tech.

I didn't bother to read the article. Headlines are important There are other things to rage about Big Tech, this is not the one.

All the govt said was "we'll only force scanning when it's "technically feasible" to do so" - i.e. when someone believes the CSAM scanning quality is high enough beyond some given threshold. It's still scanning though, and still fundamentally undermines encryption; it's just potentialy delaying the implementation a bit... having enabled it in law. The thing we should be fighting is enabling it in law.

Politico just published an article which nailed it: https://www.politico.eu/article/whatsapp-signal-meta-faceboo...

> "On Wednesday, Whittaker and other privacy campaigners falsely claimed that London was pulling back from its bid to access encrypted messages"

Likewise, the Government has spelt out very clearly that they consider absolutely nothing to have changed: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66716502

dang: it's almost worth flagging this thread as being based on entirely incorrect data. For whatever reason, the desire to make progress on this issue means that folks have jumped the gun and are prematurely celebrating a win which is not a win, and thus undermining the whole campaign to protect encryption.

The only relevant part of from op is the govt acknowledging that 2+2 = 4. But it fails to acknowledge that if they want to get 5, they can still order the equation to be 3+2.

The Conservative party's own members tore it to shreds.

From: https://cybershow.uk/media/episodes/OSB1_r2_2023-08-27.mp3 *

"The source of the bill itself, the UK Conservative Party, has a significant number of its own critics calling it "fundamentally misdesigned" David Davis said its well-intentioned attempts may constitute "the biggest accidental curtailment of free speech in modern history."

(* sadly my other sincere comment has been buried by people who apparently can't read past the first line)

To revive this, they would have to find an expert to attest that it is technically feasible to have security with a backdoor that government can access, but at the same time is impossible for malicious entities to access.

Ergo, this is technically dead, which is the best form of dead.

Campaigning to your MP is and always has been a waste of time.

In addition, the "safer" their seat, the more of a waste of space the MP is because they know their constituents would vote for a pig if the right coloured rosette pinned to it.

Most of the time they don't bother replying, and then if they do reply, you get a two-page party political broadcast, followed by a generic paragraph about "how they understand your concern blah blah blah" but never addressing the point at hand.

When the general sentiment of the average Dave is ‘encryption === bad’ this BS will rear its head again.

Seems to have been the standard play for governments of this country for decades now.

^ Again, in practice if not in law: since no service provider could fully identify and restrict all 'adult' material in real-time, they will be effectively unable to serve any interactive content to minors. Only if the penalties for non-compliance were low enough would the largest of companies take that risk.

Maybe that's why they want to keep a provision for it in the law, but develop the technology to break (current) public-key encryption schemes themselves?

But then they'll always be chasing, as the world moves to post-quantum encryption and they won't be able to break it anymore. So it'll always remain technically unfeasible.

Its likely that from a political standpoint, it was easier to deem the bill as technically unfeasible now rather than kill it completely.

It’s really upto a few execs at tech giants betting how much money is at risk.

For UK and Canada, the state isn’t competent at building a clone of social networks with wide adoption.

China can throw insane money, regulation and Human Resources until they get what they want.

Very roughly, I assume every Whatsapp message follows something along the lines of:

1. Unencrypted input

2. Encryption

3. Encrypted transmission

4. Decryption

5. Unencrypted stream to display handler

Technically - what's to stop them from compelling Apple and Google into putting a software keyboard logger inbetween 1 & 2 and another output logger between 4 & 5?

Edit: I'm not saying this backdoor would be secure btw. Of course it wouldn't. But that seems to me a separate issue than "breaking encryption"

That's obviously not a good thing at all, and also I would think illegal, but I guess at least it's encrypted. The irony.

Imagine their influence if they would have stayed in the EU, and if France would have joined them (which they usually do when it comes to more governmental oversight of the executive branches of the government).

What scares me a little now is that there was a loss of balance, which is important for any democracy to make progress. And if Big Tech's reaction is always "well then we just pull out of your market(s)" then it's gonna be an empty threat after the third time.

I don't know how the reactions to these events will be like, but most likely we'll see an increase of propaganda press statements on "how bad secure messaging" is, trying to push the narrative into a different direction.

I can assure you that isn't the case. Whoever wrote that headline is a copywriting genius. The headline conveys almost the exact opposite of what really happened, without being factually wrong.

That doesn't happen by accident.

Also not quite democratic when the uk electorate last voted for a gov in 2019 but we have had 3 prime ministers since all with vastly different strategies, where the last 2 were chosen by anyone who wants to pay for a membership to the tory party, including fake identities made by journalists who registered from france.

If you had some context, bigtech are actually fighting to keep encryption alive and are the goodies in this story.

Context is important, so is reading. But thanks for your insight in the article you didn't read.

> UK ministers seek to allay WhatsApp and Signal concerns in encryption row

Nothing to see here folks, just a minor dispute between the Gov and two companies ...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/sep/06/whatsapp-signa...

As long as the messaging platforms don’t change their commitment then celebrating a small acknowledgement from the Government that the bill is basically unworkable is not a huge issue.

The providers can refuse.

The UK can then demand that such apps are not available in the UK.

HOWEVER ... the providers can build WASM equivalents that run in the phones browser. These can be available elsewhere in the world, and there is no way to stop UK residents from installing them. If there is no other way to have end-to-end encrypted messaging, some provider WILL offer this ... and they'll make it pretty slick. You can try prosecute each user (not much chance of success).

Legislation that fights well implemented secrecy will always eventually loose, as the government becomes just one more hostile actor, which the tech is already set up to protect against.

If the government pushes too hard, all that happens is that encrypted messaging moves out of app stores into the open internet ... and then, not only can they not see the content, they can barely see who is using it.