It’s not a cut-and-dry engineering decision - these are very muddy. I mean, if the choice is breaking Signal or walking… A lot of times, these policies, strategies, and discussions are not a Boolean.
If India passes a law or deems Signal to not be in compliance with whatever encryption regulation, will you walk? In a wide-ranging interview with Nilay Patel for The Verge, Signal president Meredith Whittaker made it clear the company will exit India (and give up access to a market with more than a billion potential users) if the Indian government heads in the direction of backdoors or compelled decryption. Signal is making it clear it won’t comply with mandates that require it to compromise its encryption, which means the Indian government’s pending threat to undermine its citizens’ security will remain only theoretical if it moves forward with this legislation. Obviously, interception is useless against end-to-end encryption, so this new power would either require companies to provide assistance in decrypting and/or intercepting messages or it would require companies falling under the mandate to unplug at least one end of the end-to-end encryption so the government can listen in. Proposed legislation would give the government the power to intercept encrypted messages. The Indian government has now gone even further. That move resulted in WhatsApp suing the Indian government over the 2021 law, claiming the mandate - which would require WhatsApp to collect and retain all message metadata in perpetuity (since it obviously can’t know in advance what information the government will come looking for) - violates India’s own privacy laws.
A law put into place mandates encrypted services collect and retain metadata about encrypted communications, something some services - like WhatsApp - don’t currently do. One route the Indian government has taken to justify its attempts to undermine encryption is the fight against online disinformation and abusive communications. The Indian government is wrong, but that hasn’t stopped it from trying to mandate backdoors or just flat-out ban encrypted communications. The government of India is one of several that take a dim view of encryption, feeling it does little more than allow criminals to avoid detection and otherwise threaten the security of the nation and the safety of the public. That hasn’t made it many friends in governments (except with government officials who utilize the service to dodge public records requests).Īn FBI official once compared Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike to a KKK member, which gives you some idea how entities, whose demands for data have been thwarted by Signal’s refusal to collect/store this data, feel about the ultra-secure messaging platform. Signal ensures its users’ security and privacy by encrypting their messages and refusing to collect a bunch of data governments or malicious hackers might find useful or interesting.
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