Boris Johnson gets summaries of sensitive government material via WhatsApp

10 comments
  1. I’d be equally inclined to believe he gets the summaries on six-page board books illustrated by Axel Schaeffler, with lift-up flaps.

  2. Well if it’s routinely used in the military, policing and the NHS, it’s not surprising the government use it as well

  3. The same end to end encrypted app that his government wanted to ban the public from using?
    (so councils etc can snoop freely on your communications)

  4. Well at least it’s end-to-end encrypted. Better than standard email, text message, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and a bunch of other options.

    Signal would be better though, then at least the metadata isn’t visible to Meta.

  5. Clearly Boris isn’t worried about Facebook & his WhatsApp privacy, sure its end to end encrypted – but I believe when persuaded to do so many of these company’s can remotely swap encryption keys & then view all messages from that point onwards.

    So past messages are indeed lost to the encrypted abyss, but if they or say a state sponsored hacking group, managed to remotely swap the keys it’s not much of a stretch to think someone could be actively gathering that information today.

    And while I know WhatsApp does warn when a security key changes, what are the chances Boris would actually put on his cyber security cap & enquire to that change, especially when I imagine the powers involved probably change phones (therefore security key) on a regular basis so any warning would be ignored… Not to mention it isn’t impossible to think any remote key swapping function wouldn’t also have a silent method for doing so.

  6. Here’s an interesting question: Do we think Johnson even knows how to use email?

  7. Does this mean his red boxes are used for his packed lunches? Or maybe he can get three of four bottles of wine in there?

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