Oversight
The Trump Administration Is Coming After WhatsApp
Attorney General William Barr has made clear his desire to dismantle the security of our encryption services
Just as Americans face yet another devastating data breach — this time with the Capital One credit card servers — the Trump administration seems bent on weakening our collective cybersecurity even further.
It’s hard to count the number of recent devastating cybersecurity episodes, whether it’s on Capital One, Equifax, or the U.S. government itself. With these attacks on an uptick, it’s been encouraging to see a corresponding rise in chat applications that offer end-to-end encryption — a boon to everyone’s privacy and security.
Messaging apps like WhatsApp, iMessage, and Signal provide consumers strong safeguards, where everyone’s messages are encrypted by default — even the companies that own the message applications can’t access them. These services are collectively providing billions of people with protections to prevent their messages from landing in the next massive data dump (not to mention helping to protect everyone from government mass surveillance). Device encryption, too, is becoming standard on cellphones. Even Apple, for example, can’t unlock an iPhone that is encrypted with a…
