> publishing information deemed harmful to state interests
Is the charge, which I think kind of speaks for itself. Full on: "You embarrassed us, straight to jail."
In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest and shared by the media then we'd reflect on if our routing is safe/correct and make proportional changes for safety. Not a big deal, nobody is fired, life moves on.
I feel like actions like this are going to hurt the UAE themselves, because how can you improve if there is no dialog? No information to even start a dialog? A lot of hard conversations are NOT going to be had because I guess it is a state secret?
The UAE doesn't have a self-advancement culture, it's a capital-backed monarchy that imports pretty much all of its research and production; in other words it piggy-backs on the knowledge produced in other societies. There is no advancement through dialog in the country itself.
They're effectively at war and are freaking out about capital flight which poses a unique existential risk to them especially.
I imagine most countries in that situation would clamp down on freedom of speech and prohibit sharing photos of missile strikes. This would include most of the ones that pay lip service to freedom of speech in peace time.
Ukraine does it to avoid assisting Russian damage assessment and targeting efforts. Avoiding embarrassment is not really part of the equation, especially when they need to push for more international support.
They want to make it so Iran doesn’t know if they successfully hit that Oracle data centre.
But they also want to make it so foreign investors don’t get scared off by the prospect of their data centre getting blown up.
Which of these is the bigger motivation? Hard to say. But I gather most drones have cameras, so I imagine Iran have a pretty good idea of where their drones are striking.
>In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest and shared
OTOH, anyone remember "loose lips sink ships?" Beyond the famous poster, it was backed up by robust censorship laws.[0][1]
You might say it's different since we were at war, but this ignores how the threat model and immediacy is very different in the UAE vs here in the (geographically well protected/isolated) US.
Battle damage assessment, especially if it's timely, is critical information in any conflict. This is especially true for modern drone-based / hybrid asymmetrical conflict.
Loose Lips Sink Ships was itself an information management scheme to avoid informing the public.
The Germans didn't have spies collecting rumors in the US. Nor did they need them during Operation Drumbeat (the U-Boat attack on the US coast). The US was completely unprepared for Drumbeat. They had no harbor defenses, no convoys, inadequate and unprepared coastwatcher and patrol services.
The point of the censorship is to not cause panic among the public as they realized how badly the US was losing. Drumbeat was worse for the US than the attack on Pearl Harbor was, both in terms of lost ships and number of Americans killed. It was about controlling embarrassment for the Navy. American ships were blowing up and sinking within eyesight of shore. Vacationers were finding dead seaman washed up on the beaches of Florida and New Jersey. The military did not want these events turning into major media events.
And to the extent that the censorship was justified, yes, at the very least we were legally in a properly declared war.
Ironically, there was one time the media did cause a massive problem that could have affected the outcome of the war.
The Chicago Tribune sent a reporter to Pearl Harbor after the battle of Midway and managed to learn from some indiscreet senior commanders that we knew where the Japanese fleet was because we cracked their codes.
The reporter published the story in the Tribune. It was pure dumb luck that the Japanese never noticed the story. Roosevelt wanted the reporter and John McCormick brought up on espionage charges, but Admiral King asked him not to prosecute because the Japanese didn't seem to notice the article but they'd definitely notice the trial.
Iran is going to be getting constant satellite date. They not only have their own satellite surveillance systems, but also will be getting support, probably covert, from a variety of other countries which also have robust satellite networks.
This is solely for "domestic" (which extends well beyond the UAE) PR purposes, and I expect the US is actively encouraging these countries, behind the scenes, to keep losses under wraps.
It's not in the interests of the UAE to improve. There's the (possibly misattributed? but topical nonetheless) quote by the previous emir of Dubai:
> My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.
They want to prolong the Land Rover phase as long as possible.
Note that they did not "publish" the picture. They shared it in a private group. This is 1984 kind of stuff. This will hurt Dubai's brand way more than any kinetic attack from Iran.
Dubai's brand (before the war) was "you're welcome to come here to make money, but criticize the government and you're out". I'm sure there's a ton of young influencers who don't know the first thing about the place to not have internalized it, but I remember a spate of articles and books about 15 years ago of Westerners falling afoul of the local laws and losing everything.
There are a lot of things that I would expect to hurt Dubai's "brand" but people still travel there. I don't understand why anyone would travel there in times of peace, let alone during war. You don't even need it for connecting flights.
> In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest
You'd absolutely get detained by authorities in Ukraine or Russia for sharing consequences of airstrikes on critical infrastructure. I'm sure other countries would do the same (not that it's good).
obviously, countries have ways to determine BDAs for their attacks, but you don't have to give it to them for free. The concept of oversharing is lost in the age of social media.
It's public interest of Dubainers of not to expose any problems, as the premise of the emirate is built on loose money, loose rules and high life and this kind of money is first to flee in the case of hiccups.
there are two sides, such as how photos can stress citizens and act as propaganda, making them harmful to state interests, ultimately it is their country and their rules, not yours, regardless of how much you disagree with it
you are also missing the elephant in the room, whatsapp's claim of end-to-end encryption is a lie
The actual text from the article implies that OS exploits compromised the device.
"The UAE government owns majority holdings in telecom companies Etisalat and Du. This gives security services the power to observe all communications on their networks.
"The Arab state has also used the Israeli-developed software Pegasus which allows agents to listen into private calls and read messages, even if they are shared on encrypted apps like WhatsApp,.
"The spyware can infect a device even without the user activating a link - such as via a WhatsApp call, even if it isn't answered.
"Once inside, it can access all WhatsApp messages, logos and contacts."
Even personal chats are publicly not E2E encrypted.
There are other insidious ways you can publicly and openly end E2E encryption (I think backups might do that).
Essentially, while WhatsApp may not be lying their default 1 to 1 chats are E2E encrypted, it makes sense to use it as if it weren’t because it’s so easy to disable it even with their publicly disclosed information.
Wrong. Both WhatsApp and Signal group chats are E2EE.
Telegram group chats are not. Even 1on1 chats aren‘t E2EE on Telegram by default.
Also, reporting is an issue: If a member of the group "Reports" a message to WhatsApp, a copy of the recent messages in that chat is decrypted and sent to WhatsApp for review to check for terms-of-service violations.
Foreign residents cannot criticize UAE or its government and monarchy in any way, under threat of prison and/or torture.
How is that complicated to understand? It's a brutal regime with a fake Monaco to attract rich tourists, influencers, investors and prostitutes, but the moment you fall in disgrace in the eyes of the authorities, you're done.
> ‘I was beaten and tortured’: how a British father and son made a fortune in Dubai then became wanted men
> In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest
In peacetime, definitely. In war time, there's a necessary balance to be found between “information as public interest” and “providing free battle damage assessment” to an adversary.
I'm not saying I'm in favor of jailing people for pictures, but we cannot ignore the importance of intelligence in modern combat with ubiquitous precision weapons.
People have similarly been arrested for filming air defense at work in Ukraine, and again it makes sense because giving away key sensitive information for social network cred isn't something you want in a country suffering from a military aggression.
These days when you hear "most of the world.." used as a kind of indirect appeal to common-sense legislation, you just gotta wonder what or who they are talking about anymore.
Its a strange beautiful notion though. That there is some grand consesus out there somewhere, in The-most-of-the-world, where laws are just and rational, where states-of-exception only exist in the kitchens and the classrooms. I just know one day the barrelman will cry out, and we will know we have reached the-most-the-world.
Presumably the UAE's legislators see the matter differently. But it is extremely "20th Century" of you, obvious American that you are, not really to understand sovereignty as a concept. Or not anyone else's sovereignty, anyway.
I'm not American. America didn't even exist when most of the core social concepts I referenced were popularized, and it certainly wasn't in the 20th century.
Also, very self-telling, that I said "UAE should do better for UAE's own future sake" to which you responded: "you want to take away UAE's sovereignty!" Hmm, very odd, that.
> In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest and shared by the media
Perhaps, but increasingly not here in the US, which used to consider itself the leader of the "Free World".
Trump thinks nothing of declaring journalists terrorists and threatening to take away the broadcast licenses of TV stations that are embarrassing him.
It'd be nice if we could say this is just Trump, a bad president gone gaga, but the Republican party supports him, so unfortunately this authoritarian control of the media seems to be becoming normalized.
> Radha Stirling, chief executive of London-based advocacy group Detained in Dubai, said Dubai police had "explicitly confirmed they are conducting electronic surveillance operations capable of detecting private WhatsApp messages."
And later it mentions that they "also" use the Pegasus spyware. Although I'm not sure I'd trust that as actual confirmation that this was a separate attack vector. Even if "someone in the chat leaked it" is AIUI the most common way something like this would happen.
> Radha Stirling, chief executive of London-based advocacy group Detained in Dubai, said Dubai police had "explicitly confirmed they are conducting electronic surveillance operations capable of detecting private WhatsApp messages."
“[w]hen a nation is at war, many things that might be said in times of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.” Schenck v. United States (1919)
"In 1969, Schenck was largely overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio, which limited the scope of speech that the government may ban to that directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot)." - Wikipedia
Yes because with the first amendment, a president can’t sue news organizations for saying mean things and get them to pay him personally $15 million a piece (Paramount/CBS and Disney/ABC) and teachers can’t be fired for quoting racist comments of a dead podcaster.
It's entirely common for the government to wipe their ass with the first amendment during wartime.
> The objective of wartime censorship was to prevent the exposure of sensitive military information to the enemy. Similar censorship had been practiced by the U.S. Army in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. During World War I, however, the press censorship system was formalized and extended, according to the Army's official history, to include anything that might "injure morale in our forces here, or at home, or among our Allies," or "embarrass the United States or her Allies in neutral countries."
Hauntingly, they’re actually calling the ME “west asia” now.
In my copy of animal farm, there’s actually a foreword relevant for this discussion. It goes into Orwells difficulty getting things published around ww2 as there was speech that whilst legal was frowned upon during wartime.
“It’s fine because it happened during WWII, the only thing we base history off of to determine limiting rights is fine. Dumber less informed people did it, so should we!”
If you believe Trump wouldn't be doing things like this if America was actually facing direct consequences for its warmongering, I have a bridge to sell you.
The censorship is to shield embarrassing info from GCC and American audiences. As others have pointed out, Iran has its own satellites, and allies with satellites that can conduct their own battlefield damage assessments.
I'm of two minds on this. In peacetime, I'd consider something like that to be unreasonable and harmful, not that I'd ever even consider setting foot anywhere on the Arabian Peninsula. But, if anyone has noticed, World War III is raging all around us, and when an enemy who wants to kill you is backing that up with explosive payloads, you really don't want to be handing them battle damage assessments.
Indeed. And interestingly those people also believe this myth that Emirates is somehow always super luxurious. Emirates Economy is just as cattle class as all other large airlines, but with a worse safety record and having to go through Dubai. Just don't do it.
Probably referring to crew rest hours (esp. a problem in the late 2010s, near-misses at DXB etc.
Not having had passenger fatalities is a bad indicator for safety records in the 21st century.
The ek521 report is a good example documenting systemic failures at EK
They didn't actually crack WhatsApp traffic. Someone in the group probably just reported it.
WhatsApp's insecurities are that Meta has access to a full network graph of all users' contacts, and that it wants to upload an unencrypted backup to Google or Apple by default. If there was an actual backdoor in the closed-source crypto, I highly doubt they'd give Dubai police access to it.
I’ll preface this with agreeing that you’re probably correct.
That said, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Meta built an intentional backdoor, and that someone else (or many someone else’s) found it and was utilizing it.
> They didn't actually crack WhatsApp traffic. Someone in the group probably just reported it.
So you don’t know any of this? You have no proof someone in the group reported it. You have no proof they weren’t using a backdoor they found with or without Meta knowing this…
The poster is right, it's very unlikely that WA has been backdoored/cracked, and it seems obvious why.
A backdoor to the world's largest messaging app would be extremely valuable: while it can exist, it's unlikely that it'd be so widely available the UAE police can use it for such insignificant cases. And because of its value, no one with access to it (the US, the UAE, Meta) would want it to become public knowledge through such an insignificant case, because everyone they really want to spy on would switch to Signal in a second.
It’s weird that the notification backdoor never gets talked about, but your Whatsapp messages are decrypted in plain sight when the text content is shipped through the notification services. This is mentioned always for Signal but Whatsapp always gets a pass even though it’s a way more malicious company and indeed probably using that hole to profile/track it’s users.
The only response is “oh no Whatsapp cant leak anything the security model of how chat messages are backed up is a-okay!”
Signal got called out for it because it actually happened to a user with the police. Of course it affects all apps. It's also local, so irrelevant to the discussion of networked/encryption hacks someone alleged above.
> The UAE government owns majority holdings in telecom companies Etisalat and Du. This gives security services the power to observe all communications on their networks.
> The Arab state has also used the Israeli-developed software Pegasus which allows agents to listen into private calls and read messages, even if they are shared on encrypted apps like WhatsApp,.
This seems to be the key part from a tech standpoint. Notice that it doesn't come out and say whether Pegasus played a part in this particular arrest, or the telecoms, or both, but it seems to be implied.
Also, I'm intrigued by the punctuation error at the end: "...like WhatsApp,." Did an earlier draft go on to list others? Does Pegasus help governments read messages from Telegram? Signal? It would be interesting to know more.
What people do not know or understand about the Arabian Peninsula is that you have essentially zero rights.
People think, "It cannot be that bad" because a lot of money is spent on good PR for the region, and also because they never find themselves in situations where they get to see how little their lives are worth in those places.
You go to a hotel for a week or take a business trip, everyone smiles, the food is good, whatever. You are not going to trigger any of the bad stuff that way. Before you say, "Well, yeah, if you do something egregious...", nope. Something as innocuous as disagreeing with a superior at work could land you in jail. You are 100% at the whim of people who have more power than you over there.
If you have a private conversation to have that would risk you getting arrested, you shouldn't be using WhatsApp or Signal for it. Consider something more obscure, not connected to your phone number or name, and make messages disappear after 24h. Consider SimpleX, Briar, etc. Obviously don't leave any trail or photos on your device either. Moreover, the device shouldn't be reachable via WhatsApp, Signal, SMS, or even a phone number, as these are common vectors for attackers. Your mobile device should probably be using hardened GrapheneOS or something else with sufficient obscurity. Do not make the mistake of activating a SIM or installing any Google app on the device. As a legal disclaimer, do not break the law.
This defensiveness just makes the situation worse. If they came across as at a disadvantage and doing their best that could attract help and admiration. Trying to cover things up while being hostile just makes them look like reactionary creeps with too much power. An unfortunate turn of events in any case.
These ME countries are authoritarian hellholes with a thin veneer of civility and modernity. Think I'm exaggerating? How about being randomly dragged off your flight to have your vagina inspected: https://www.arabnews.jp/en/middle-east/article_30004/
Being thrown in jail arbitrarily without much recourse is such a common occurrence it's spawned its won business category: https://www.detainedindubai.org/
I personally would not step foot in any of these places. This article is not news, it's par for the course.
Not like I like the UAE (I don't), but during this war they made it plenty clear that it is illegal to record and share any videos or pictures of the damage that was caused by the Iranian attacks. Everyone in the country knows this, and I'm sure airlines have procedures to familiarize staff with the laws of the country they're flying to. If they don't, still not the UAE's problem. Don't like the law? Go somewhere else.
(inb4 any arm chair analyst decides this law is a bad law. That's not the point. The police only apply the law and not write it)
Secondly, I doubt this was some sort of high tech operation. More likely someone just snitched and/or some sort of meta data snooping.
Care to back that up? We know they don't encrypt metadata - that's not a secret. Message content however is E2EE - thankfully these things get audited: https://blog.cloudflare.com/key-transparency/
This doesn't prove WhatsApp is encrypted at all. It proves that a directory of public keys is being logged and audited. That's it.
The protocol existing or being referenced doesn't prove it's what the production client is doing. That requires verifying the client code and behaviour end-to-end, not just the key directory.
Is the charge, which I think kind of speaks for itself. Full on: "You embarrassed us, straight to jail."
In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest and shared by the media then we'd reflect on if our routing is safe/correct and make proportional changes for safety. Not a big deal, nobody is fired, life moves on.
I feel like actions like this are going to hurt the UAE themselves, because how can you improve if there is no dialog? No information to even start a dialog? A lot of hard conversations are NOT going to be had because I guess it is a state secret?
The UAE doesn't have a self-advancement culture, it's a capital-backed monarchy that imports pretty much all of its research and production; in other words it piggy-backs on the knowledge produced in other societies. There is no advancement through dialog in the country itself.
I imagine most countries in that situation would clamp down on freedom of speech and prohibit sharing photos of missile strikes. This would include most of the ones that pay lip service to freedom of speech in peace time.
Ukraine does this too.
Isn’t UAE doing this to avoid Iranian damage assessment and targeting efforts also?
They want to make it so Iran doesn’t know if they successfully hit that Oracle data centre.
But they also want to make it so foreign investors don’t get scared off by the prospect of their data centre getting blown up.
Which of these is the bigger motivation? Hard to say. But I gather most drones have cameras, so I imagine Iran have a pretty good idea of where their drones are striking.
Fuck the UAE. Beautiful people - bullshit governments. Per usual.
You might say it's different since we were at war, but this ignores how the threat model and immediacy is very different in the UAE vs here in the (geographically well protected/isolated) US.
Battle damage assessment, especially if it's timely, is critical information in any conflict. This is especially true for modern drone-based / hybrid asymmetrical conflict.
[0] https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/spring/m...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship
The Germans didn't have spies collecting rumors in the US. Nor did they need them during Operation Drumbeat (the U-Boat attack on the US coast). The US was completely unprepared for Drumbeat. They had no harbor defenses, no convoys, inadequate and unprepared coastwatcher and patrol services.
The point of the censorship is to not cause panic among the public as they realized how badly the US was losing. Drumbeat was worse for the US than the attack on Pearl Harbor was, both in terms of lost ships and number of Americans killed. It was about controlling embarrassment for the Navy. American ships were blowing up and sinking within eyesight of shore. Vacationers were finding dead seaman washed up on the beaches of Florida and New Jersey. The military did not want these events turning into major media events.
And to the extent that the censorship was justified, yes, at the very least we were legally in a properly declared war.
Ironically, there was one time the media did cause a massive problem that could have affected the outcome of the war.
The Chicago Tribune sent a reporter to Pearl Harbor after the battle of Midway and managed to learn from some indiscreet senior commanders that we knew where the Japanese fleet was because we cracked their codes.
The reporter published the story in the Tribune. It was pure dumb luck that the Japanese never noticed the story. Roosevelt wanted the reporter and John McCormick brought up on espionage charges, but Admiral King asked him not to prosecute because the Japanese didn't seem to notice the article but they'd definitely notice the trial.
This is solely for "domestic" (which extends well beyond the UAE) PR purposes, and I expect the US is actively encouraging these countries, behind the scenes, to keep losses under wraps.
> My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.
They want to prolong the Land Rover phase as long as possible.
https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/dubai-sheikhs-words-lost-in...
I think the timing stated here is quite optimistic.
You'd absolutely get detained by authorities in Ukraine or Russia for sharing consequences of airstrikes on critical infrastructure. I'm sure other countries would do the same (not that it's good).
you are also missing the elephant in the room, whatsapp's claim of end-to-end encryption is a lie
"The UAE government owns majority holdings in telecom companies Etisalat and Du. This gives security services the power to observe all communications on their networks.
"The Arab state has also used the Israeli-developed software Pegasus which allows agents to listen into private calls and read messages, even if they are shared on encrypted apps like WhatsApp,.
"The spyware can infect a device even without the user activating a link - such as via a WhatsApp call, even if it isn't answered.
"Once inside, it can access all WhatsApp messages, logos and contacts."
Even personal chats are publicly not E2E encrypted.
There are other insidious ways you can publicly and openly end E2E encryption (I think backups might do that).
Essentially, while WhatsApp may not be lying their default 1 to 1 chats are E2E encrypted, it makes sense to use it as if it weren’t because it’s so easy to disable it even with their publicly disclosed information.
Telegram group chats are not. Even 1on1 chats aren‘t E2EE on Telegram by default.
Also, reporting is an issue: If a member of the group "Reports" a message to WhatsApp, a copy of the recent messages in that chat is decrypted and sent to WhatsApp for review to check for terms-of-service violations.
Didn't UAE have a phone line to the king that anyone can call?
Sounds like the cost of actually calling it may be higher than I thought though.
10 seconds later
Hang on a minute. We have a king. Nobody can vote!
How is that complicated to understand? It's a brutal regime with a fake Monaco to attract rich tourists, influencers, investors and prostitutes, but the moment you fall in disgrace in the eyes of the authorities, you're done.
> ‘I was beaten and tortured’: how a British father and son made a fortune in Dubai then became wanted men
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/05/british-father...
You're all acting here like UAE is some sort of reasonable country with fair laws, when it's a dictatorship.
The car junk yards are also really sketchy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrGCv3sZXAQ
And most of those influencers aren't even rich...
In peacetime, definitely. In war time, there's a necessary balance to be found between “information as public interest” and “providing free battle damage assessment” to an adversary.
I'm not saying I'm in favor of jailing people for pictures, but we cannot ignore the importance of intelligence in modern combat with ubiquitous precision weapons.
People have similarly been arrested for filming air defense at work in Ukraine, and again it makes sense because giving away key sensitive information for social network cred isn't something you want in a country suffering from a military aggression.
Its a strange beautiful notion though. That there is some grand consesus out there somewhere, in The-most-of-the-world, where laws are just and rational, where states-of-exception only exist in the kitchens and the classrooms. I just know one day the barrelman will cry out, and we will know we have reached the-most-the-world.
Also, very self-telling, that I said "UAE should do better for UAE's own future sake" to which you responded: "you want to take away UAE's sovereignty!" Hmm, very odd, that.
Perhaps, but increasingly not here in the US, which used to consider itself the leader of the "Free World".
Trump thinks nothing of declaring journalists terrorists and threatening to take away the broadcast licenses of TV stations that are embarrassing him.
It'd be nice if we could say this is just Trump, a bad president gone gaga, but the Republican party supports him, so unfortunately this authoritarian control of the media seems to be becoming normalized.
And later it mentions that they "also" use the Pegasus spyware. Although I'm not sure I'd trust that as actual confirmation that this was a separate attack vector. Even if "someone in the chat leaked it" is AIUI the most common way something like this would happen.
Whoa.
But the actual article is much more haunting.
https://www.recyclingtoday.com/news/aluminum-association-com...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
https://cbs12.com/news/local/matthew-theobold-florida-martin...
> The objective of wartime censorship was to prevent the exposure of sensitive military information to the enemy. Similar censorship had been practiced by the U.S. Army in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. During World War I, however, the press censorship system was formalized and extended, according to the Army's official history, to include anything that might "injure morale in our forces here, or at home, or among our Allies," or "embarrass the United States or her Allies in neutral countries."
https://www.army.mil/article/199675/u_s_army_press_censorshi...
Happens even without a war, just saying...
It's unfortunate life isn't black and white, but that's the way it is.
In my copy of animal farm, there’s actually a foreword relevant for this discussion. It goes into Orwells difficulty getting things published around ww2 as there was speech that whilst legal was frowned upon during wartime.
The ek521 report is a good example documenting systemic failures at EK
WhatsApp's insecurities are that Meta has access to a full network graph of all users' contacts, and that it wants to upload an unencrypted backup to Google or Apple by default. If there was an actual backdoor in the closed-source crypto, I highly doubt they'd give Dubai police access to it.
That said, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Meta built an intentional backdoor, and that someone else (or many someone else’s) found it and was utilizing it.
So you don’t know any of this? You have no proof someone in the group reported it. You have no proof they weren’t using a backdoor they found with or without Meta knowing this…
You’re just here to defend Meta then?
A backdoor to the world's largest messaging app would be extremely valuable: while it can exist, it's unlikely that it'd be so widely available the UAE police can use it for such insignificant cases. And because of its value, no one with access to it (the US, the UAE, Meta) would want it to become public knowledge through such an insignificant case, because everyone they really want to spy on would switch to Signal in a second.
The only response is “oh no Whatsapp cant leak anything the security model of how chat messages are backed up is a-okay!”
Way easier for one of a group of humans to report than for a conspiracy hack
> The Arab state has also used the Israeli-developed software Pegasus which allows agents to listen into private calls and read messages, even if they are shared on encrypted apps like WhatsApp,.
This seems to be the key part from a tech standpoint. Notice that it doesn't come out and say whether Pegasus played a part in this particular arrest, or the telecoms, or both, but it seems to be implied.
Also, I'm intrigued by the punctuation error at the end: "...like WhatsApp,." Did an earlier draft go on to list others? Does Pegasus help governments read messages from Telegram? Signal? It would be interesting to know more.
People think, "It cannot be that bad" because a lot of money is spent on good PR for the region, and also because they never find themselves in situations where they get to see how little their lives are worth in those places.
You go to a hotel for a week or take a business trip, everyone smiles, the food is good, whatever. You are not going to trigger any of the bad stuff that way. Before you say, "Well, yeah, if you do something egregious...", nope. Something as innocuous as disagreeing with a superior at work could land you in jail. You are 100% at the whim of people who have more power than you over there.
Leaving a bad review online for a local business can get you arrested and jailed.
Being thrown in jail arbitrarily without much recourse is such a common occurrence it's spawned its won business category: https://www.detainedindubai.org/
I personally would not step foot in any of these places. This article is not news, it's par for the course.
(inb4 any arm chair analyst decides this law is a bad law. That's not the point. The police only apply the law and not write it)
Secondly, I doubt this was some sort of high tech operation. More likely someone just snitched and/or some sort of meta data snooping.
Give up the entire fucking Constitution for order, low taxes and non unionized servants.
The protocol existing or being referenced doesn't prove it's what the production client is doing. That requires verifying the client code and behaviour end-to-end, not just the key directory.