captain red dog wrote:Doesn't appear to have been used widespread by citizens, certainly not by the likes of the IRA or other domestic terrorist cells from what I can see. Whatsapp is a game changer in that respect.
If criminals weren't using one-time pads before the Internet then my hypothesis would be that there are even easier ways to organise a crime without the authorities being able to listen in -- like secretly meeting up in a park, or mailing each other vague instructions that don't make sense if you're not in the group, or buying a new burner phone every week... that's just off the top of my head!
It's possible some serious crimes have been plotted using WhatsApp - maybe we won't ever know - but that doesn't mean taking WhatsApp away will foil them. There are ways to exchange messages over the 'deep web' and all that stuff which I think should be of more concern to authorities than mainstream chat apps.
Rather than erasing privacy - by breaking encryption, legislating for transparent envelopes, putting a GCHQ mic in every phone, or bugging every lamppost in every park - it would be better, I would imagine, to invest in human intelligence to infiltrate and monitor the communities that are producing radicalised people.
That's the ideological argument against it. The practical argument is that breaking encryption breaks the Internet's usefulness. If ordinary people can't use encryption then we can't have online banking, or shopping, or government websites, or NHS interfaces for your local surgery, or communication with your solicitor, or a great many of the other applications of the Internet that enhance our lives. If all of those communications have to be 'breakable' then hackers will raze our Internet infrastructure. It'll be a cyber-bloodbath.