It seems that the WhatsApp application for instant conversations may stop being used in Britain if the British government insists on moving forward with the implementation of the safety law that weakens the full encryption of WhatsApp messages, a bill introduced for the first time under former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The Independent newspaper said that Will Cathcart, director of “WhatsApp” in the parent company, “META”, warned that the famous application would refuse to abide by the government’s implementation of the Internet Safety Law during the coming period, which would directly affect the encryption of conversations that WhatsApp adopts to ensure privacy. User conversations.
He stressed that this decision may make WhatsApp vulnerable to stopping in Britain, which will affect the interests of millions of users, while defenders of the decision argue that the authorities need to see the conversations to reveal any illegal content.
astonishment
Cathcart expressed his surprise at London's intention to restrict the use of WhatsApp, and stressed that experience in different regions of the world has proven that such a thing only happens in countries that intend to suppress the freedoms of their citizens and prevent them from communicating freely.
The Independent quoted Will Cathcart as saying that any government's claim that it is a liberal democracy is completely inconsistent with its quest to see private communications under the pretext of searching for illegal correspondence, stressing that this will encourage other countries to follow the same path.
Israeli espionage
And in May 2020, WhatsApp said that an Israeli spy company was "heavily involved" in hacking the accounts of 1,400 users of the application, including journalists, government officials, and opponents, by targeting them with hack calls.
The company filed lawsuits against the NSO Group - an Israeli company specialized in installing spyware - for using servers located in the United States and violating human rights in India and Rwanda.
The Israeli company has always stated that the spyware it develops is bought by governments and other customers to track criminals, and this means that the employees of this company are not familiar with how to use the program.
However, in reality, the lawsuit says that the program - known as "Pegasus" - hacked the phones of the targeted people after NSO accessed the WhatsApp servers.
And at the beginning of last January, the US Supreme Court rejected an attempt by the Israeli “NSO” technology group to block a lawsuit filed by the WhatsApp application against it, accusing it of using the Facebook-owned messaging service to spy on journalists, human rights activists, and others.
Court files revealed its refusal of the NSO Group's request for judicial immunity, and it considered that the consideration of the case targeting the Pegasus program that the company designed could continue before a federal court in California.
Pegasus is considered one of the most dangerous and sophisticated spyware programs, and it specifically targets smart devices running the “IOS” operating system of Apple, but there is a version for Android devices that differs somewhat from the (iOS) version.
The program infects iPhone and Android devices to enable messages, photos and emails to be obtained, to record calls, and to operate microphones and cameras unobtrusively.