‘Five Eyes’ nations discuss backdoor access to WhatsApp

British, American and other intelligence agencies from English-speaking countries have concluded a two-day meeting in London amid calls for spies and police officers to be given special, backdoor access to WhatsApp and other encrypted communications. GCHQ, the UK agency which monitors and breaks into communications, has suggested that Silicon Valley companies could develop technology that would silently add a police officer or intelligence agent to conversations or group chats. The moment these fascists turn the backdoor into a legal requirement and manage to steer it through their respective legislitave bodies - by calling it the If You Do Not Support This You Are A Pedophile Act or whatever - the game is pretty much over. The technology companies will roll over and implement these backdoors overnight - just look at how happily technology companies work with the Chinese government. In fact, Facebook is already testing a backdoor in this style today: To solve this problem, Facebook announced earlier this year preliminary results from its efforts to move a global mass surveillance infrastructure directly onto users' devices where it can bypass the protections of end-to-end encryption. In Facebook's vision, the actual end-to-end encryption client itself such as WhatsApp will include embedded content moderation and blacklist filtering algorithms. These algorithms will be continually updated from a central cloud service, but will run locally on the user's device, scanning each cleartext message before it is sent and each encrypted message after it is decrypted. This is going to happen, and it's going to be a disaster.