the essential
A vulnerability in WhatsApp’s encryption system allows governments to know who an individual is sending messages to. What uses could they make of it? Meta, the parent company of the digital and theoretically very protected messaging service, reacts.
“Privacy and security are in our genes,” says the WhatsApp messaging help center. “Only you and the person you are communicating with can read or listen to what is sent.” An entirely true statement. The content of messages sent by WhatsApp’s 2 billion users worldwide is encrypted and can only be read by the sender and recipient.
Powerful encryption that does not prevent governments from knowing which users communicate with each other and which groups they belong to. This is what a long investigation by the American media The Intercept reveals. The technique used is “traffic analysis”, a “decades old” surveillance technique.
The Intercept explains that intelligence services can unmask WhatsApp users by tracing their IP address (the unique number assigned to each device used to connect to the internet) to their internet or mobile service provider account. It would even be possible, if users are chatting on the same network and in the same country, to possibly have access to their location.
Israel in the crosshairs?
For the overwhelming majority of WhatsApp users, there is nothing to worry about. But employees of Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company, are concerned about the use that the Israeli army could make of it in its fight against terrorism and fear that the lives of Palestinians could be put in danger.
Israeli online news magazine +972 revealed last month that the Israeli army uses software called Lavender, intended to mine data from the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million residents. Lavender’s algorithm assigns a score from 1 to 100 to each person. A suspicious individual will have a high rating and “will automatically become a potential assassination target”, assures the media +972. Still according to the Israeli media, the use of WhatsApp is part of the multitude of personal characteristics that the Israeli army uses.
Meta defends WhatsApp security
Asked by The Guardianthe Israeli army assures that Lavender is a simple database for cross-referencing intelligence sources and that it does not use artificial intelligence to “predict whether a person is a terrorist”.
For its part, Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, assures that it has “no evidence of vulnerabilities in the functioning of WhatsApp” and is working to “further strengthen our systems against any future threats”. Reassuring words also intended to protect the listed social media giant.
