I'm certain that people will take an emotional reaction to what you've written, but I just want to be the first to say that I think you're right.

"Whatsapp" is the new "talking to the person in the corridor" or "having a quick chat down the pub", it's not the new email, and having them leak is ironically the most accountability we've seen.

I'll use an example of someone I support generally now: Tony Blair was accused of having backroom discussions regarding the invasion of Iraq and secret meetings away from even his cabinet[0]. Since we only have hearsay of what went on, it's very difficult to hold him accountable for this.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-12306377

In the US, it's Signal. In the UK, it was WhatsApp.

When researchers dumped 100% of Signal's users in the USA, because its contact discovery API has no rate limiting, they found a huge portion of Signal's US userbase has Washington D.C. area codes.

"Signal; Washington D.C. numbers are more than twice as likely to be registered with Signal than for any other area in the US" https://encrypto.de/papers/HWSDS21.pdf

Meanwhile, in Scotland since the pandemic, Nicola Sturgeon ran her government with an entirely parallel communication network on WhatsApp, explicitly to prevent her government's discussions and decisions from being discoverable by FoI requests.

There was daily deletion of messages. It was drummed into people by Sturgeon's head civil servant, Ken "Plausible Deniability" Thompson: https://archive.is/jK6Bd

> Thomson was head of the Covid co-ordination directorate of the Scottish government and wrote: “Just to remind you (seriously), this is discoverable under FOI [freedom of information]. Know where the “clear chat” button is…”. He later added: “Plausible deniability are my middle names. Now clear it again!”

Sturgeon, just like Boris Johnson, retained zero WhatsApp messages: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-scotland-67949454

Scotland only banned use of WhatsApp in government 4 months ago: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g8pe585z1o

I don't really mind someone foreign having access to what is being said, as much as I mind public servants not being able to be held accountable because all of the discussions are encrypted.

The compliance (audibility, recovery, etc) is the big problem, IMO, not the security.

Is it that hard? Every time I moved to a new phone, whatsapp's backups are in my google drive and restored without any problem whatsoever

Politicians around the world do it on purpose because they know they can more easily get away with leaving no trace.

It's not an accident they don't use government email/IM and use WhatsApp/Signal instead.

But then they turn around and want to convince us it's bad when we use it. Because they're the ones handling “acceptable” secrets, somehow.

The US gov started using Signal before Trump and they were backing up Signal chat logs (which it seems the UK wasn't doing with WhatsApp?). It was just controversial which vendor the prior US gov had chosen to handle the backups (an Israeli tech firm) and how it was used by the executive branch. But they were ultimately following transparency/archiving rules.

I never saw any reporting after those Signal chat stories came out. At the time it was reported that they had a period of time to make sure conversation were archived properly. It would be interesting to know if that actually happened.

>The criminals will just flock to the "real encryption" and not the honeypots/ backdoored messengers as they are being caught. In the end word of mouth will spread: "This is safe, this is unsafe."

Actually the opposite seems to be true. Criminal gangs are particularly susceptible to honeypots precisely because they don't trust the mainstream services.

2 prominent example was that huge sting operation a couple of years back where a supposedly "secure" service was being run by the FBI. And then you have the infamous pager plot, which is admittedly very different but it perfectly illustrates how shaky alternative communications can be.

>Just because a few Kremlin bots on Telegram are brainwashing people in the west, the west doesn't have to become North Korea.

From the hysteria this has generated you would think it was the most crippling threat western democracy has faced since communism.

Yes, and now he's the NATO Secretary General. As PM, he employed the obvious and straighforward defense against the Dutch version of FOIA of keeping the most important communications in-person behind closed doors[1].

I'd assume many high ranking Western politicians do something similar, while paying lip service to high minded ideals about openness, transparancy and democracy.

[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutte-doctrine

Eschewing responsibility through these kinds of "tricks", where the person obviously thinks themselves so above everyone else that they can make them idiots to their face, makes my blood boil.

It's always either public "servants" in power, or the rich people, putting themselves outside of the rules. If you are an elected official, and make a stunt like this, it should be grounds for immediate dismissal, IMO. But, alas, nowadays these kinds of things are so minor and irrelevant, in the sea of ridiculously horrible stuff they do.

It's at least refreshing that there are still places, like the Netherlands in this case, where there are some (even when it's surface-level) repercussions of such behavior.

messages could be (and usually are) stored server side. Plus SMS is not secure at all and easy to eavesdrop on.