Sudhir Yadav, an RTI activist and a web developer, has filed a case in the Supreme Court of India, asking for a ban on Whatsapp, Telegram, and other messenger services which have end to end encryption, and provide the Indian government with no means of accessing these messages, citing this as a National Security concern. As per the information given to MediaNama by Yadav, the case is presently before the registrar, after which it will be listed for hearing before the Supreme Court. Yadav's plea for allowing government access to messenger apps is balanced with a demand for privacy provisions, and he says that the Supreme Court should pass rules it deems appropriate, keeping in mind national security and privacy. Yadav says that after he heard about Whatsapp being encrypted end-to-end, he realized that it becomes impossible for governments to access messages in the interest of National Security, and "even a hundred thousand super computers" trying "million billion keys every second" will take "trillions of trillions of trillions of years" to decrypt the content. An easy solution, he says, is to have access of the private key of the recipient to read the message. But in the WhatsApp Encryption Overview Technical white paper (probably this), it is mentioned that WhatsApp servers do not have access to the private keys of WhatsApp users; this means that even in case of a Court order in India, even WhatsApp won't be able to decrypt the messages. MediaNama spoke with Yadav at length about…
