Thinking about “traceability”
A few weeks ago the messaging service WhatsApp sued the Indian government over new legislation that could undermine its end-to-end encryption (E2EE) software. The legislation requires, among other things, that social media and messaging companies must include the ability to “trace” the source of harmful viral content.
This tracing capability has been a major issue in India due to several cases of misinformation content that led to brutal mob attacks. The ostensible goal of the new legislation is to make it possible for police to track down those who originate or disseminate this content. Put simply, what the authorities want is a means to identify a piece of content (say, a video or a meme) that has gone to a large group of people, and then trace the content back to the WhatsApp account that originally sent it.
I don’t plain to weigh in very heavily about whether this policy is a good idea or viable on the merits — except to express a very grave degree of skepticism that this approach will every catch a criminal who is remotely clever. Here I just want to talk about the technology implications for encrypted messaging services, and what tracing features might mean for end-to-end encrypted systems like WhatsApp.
