WhatsApp is your life, isn’t it? Well, there is a piece of bad news for you! Soon, this messaging app might be banned! Yes you heard it right!
Next Wednesday, the Supreme Court would be hearing a petition which seeks ban on WhatsApp! This petition was filed on the ground that WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption isn’t safe and it gives terrorists an easy way to communicate. This is quite risky for the nation since there would be no access to these messages.
This petition was filed by RTI activist in Haryana named Sudhir Yadav. He said that since April, WhatsApp has started enabling all the messages with 256-bit encryption, due to which they can’t be traced or accessed.
In the petition, Yadav said
“Even if WhatsApp was asked to break through an individual’s message to hand over the data to the government, it too would fail as it does not have the decryption keys either,”
Yadav seeks a ban on WhatsApp in India and says that any criminal or terrorist can safely use WhatsApp for chatting and making plans to harm India and even Intelligence agencies won’t be able to tap their conversations.
The petition even said that for decrypting message on Whatsapp, a whopping 115,792,089,237,316,195,423,570,985,008,687,907,853,269,984,665,640,564,039,457,584,007,913,129,639,935 key combinations have to be used and this cannot be done even with a super computer. It would take 100s of years to do so.
The petition further said that even platforms like Viber, Secure Chat, Hike etc. use high encryption and can cause threat to the nation. Yadav also stated that before he filed the petition, he wrote letters to Ministry of communications and IT and Telecom Regulatory Authority Of India, but didn’t get any reply.
Now, his public interest litigation petition would be heard on the 29th of June.
