Is it just me, or the government of India is cracking down of all end to end encryption apps like signal and element.
Cause I guy who works for the police came to my house and asked whether I use signal and element
The majority of users on Lemmy are probably not from India, I would say our userbase skews US/Europe.
This is a very, very interesting and important story, if it’s true.
Do you have any other evidence of this happening? It’s okay if your sources are not in English, that’s just the nature of local media, it speaks the local language.
Would love to hear more about this from your perspective, @Ritsu4Life@lemmy.world because this is a big, important issue that needs discussion if it’s really happening. Please expand your thoughts and any evidence you may have in the comments section, please and thank you.
Finally, thank you for bringing this to our attention at all. Cheers.
Thanks for the comment. I haven’t found any local news for this. I may update this once I find any
And for my story: A guy came from the police station he had a list all the people who were using "signal, element and bip (not open source, full of ads but encrypted) and a buch more end to end encrypted apps. Shown my mobile number, address and my name.
Told me why I was using signal and element and also had to show my chats. Didn’t look at all the chats, was curious tho.
Said that these apps were used by terrorist and all and you should switch to WhatsApp.
WhatsApp runs India. It is a backbone all Indian users and it is also e2ee for all I know
That’s very curious. The push to WhatsApp is especially interesting considering it is owned by Meta/Facebook, which is a company that has a long history of working with the US government for extrajudicial surveillance of the US populace. I wonder if they’re working with the Indian government in a similar capacity.
As such, I fully personally expect WhatsApp to have officially sanctioned government backdoors. If they’re willing to build them for the US government, maybe they’re building them for the Indian government, too. Which is perhaps why there is a push towards the corporate, non-open solution, because the other options have more ways for individuals to avoid backdoors.
We really need more community owned and operated communications groups, like the barbed wire telephone of the past.
I wonder how they’d detect their usage. Signal is understandable, it has central servers (although I thought they were blocked and thus their usage wouldn’t be detectable under a good VPN anyway). But Matrix? Are they looking for connections to known public servers? Or the usage of the protocol itself stands out so that even selfhosted servers would stand out?
If I were in such a situation, I’d start to hide traffic to anything they might dislike anyway.
Didn’t look at all the chats, was curious tho.
Probably just skimmed through the group names looking for something like “Anti-Modi Protest Group”.
Looks like they did ban them if this is trustworthy source
(e)People are speculating that because india didn’t ban signal or whatsapp, they have backdoors. Source
Hmm, so they’ve been banned for over a year. I wonder why they’d start actually doing a door-to-door crackdown now.
Also, Tuta is relatively trustworthy. It’s more that since they offer encrypted email services, they often get blocked under these kind of orders as well, so they are pretty active in arguing against such blocks. Tuta has been blocked in Egypt and Russia, for example. Despite that being true, in many ways, it’s an ad for their service, and a type of public relations that involves them “showing” that they “care” about this issue, so they seem like a “responsible” corporate entity.
I’d never heard of them before but they seem like a solid alternative to proton.
Ay yo wtf.
I thought India was a democracy?
🤔
democracy?
The definitions for that seem pretty loose nowadays.
Also made me think of this:
It’s true Indian government has banned Element and other Apps and forced Signal, WhatsApp and other such apps to have a local representative so that they can arrest someone and force their will. But there is one silver lining, it is that these politicians don’t fully understand how open source software works. So just banning Element app doesn’t do much I can switch to schildiChat or just download element source code and change the name and logo and boom I’m back in.
And also most of their app bans are just requests sent to Google play store and Apple App store, You can always download from FDroid or from other sources
and there is no real way they can enforce these stupid laws.
They started going through chats on traffic stops, but there are ways to avoid that also
If you are interested and want to support then you can donate to https://internetfreedom.in/ or if not possible just share the word.
