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
Host your own XMPP node outside the country’s jurisdiction, turn on E2EE if it weirdly wasn’t on by default, & don’t trust the big centralized servers they could easily ban. Apparently everyone wants to dismiss XMPP since you can disable the E2EE (since it is a generic protocol for lots of stuff) despite encryption being on by default on every modern client—so there is your deniability 🙃 Unlike Matrix, the average user can afford to run it on a toaster too.
What about Simplex? About equally easy to host and doesn’t even give an option to not encrypt. I use both.
It’s still quite immature & I have my reservations that a big Haskell project can be maintained for the long-term seeing a lot of Haskell failings even in the short-term. It is a promising idea, but I am not ready yet to try it.
fair
I think the above poster is saying the ability to not be E2EE gives plausible deniability, and therefore is a feature, not a bug, in this instance.
So I looked into India and found quite a lot of attacks, that the Indian Government deems to be “Terrorism”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_India
I mean look at the long list.
Government is getting paranoid and have justification to starting to deem “encryption” as “suspicious activity”. It would be easy to use these “terrorist attacks” to convince the legislature and the population that this is necessary.
I just read an article on reddit that a foreigner having a Garmin InReach satellite messenger got arrested and interrogated for several hours for “not having a license”. https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/hiking-and-backpacking/india-garmin-inreach/
Not saying its right, it is what is is.
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.
Wait wait wait when did Element get banned? I did not know this. Also you’re right, these politicians are faaaar from understanding how Open-Source works or even how software works lol, this is just pathetic at this point. Also the traffic stops point, when did this start happening? and in which states? This is scary and extremely concerning.
Hyderabad also a fun fact Indian supreme Court has ruled that WA messages are not admissible in court.
Apps were banned only in Jammu and Kashmir
They started going through chats on traffic stops
What in the actual fuck?
Authoritarian countries do that all the time. The only surprising thing is that a supposed democratic country is doing it.
Dude what the fuck. That is scary. And here I am trying to somehow convince my friends to join signal.
By the way which state do you live in¿?
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.
The only people I know who use WhatsApp are Indian. The only reason I have ever used WhatsApp is many of my Indian friends are unreachable by any normal means. And it was that way since before Meta ever bought them. If Modi tried to completely eliminate WhatsApp than people would be upset about it.
WhatsApp is the most commonly used messaging app globally. What would be considered ‘normal’ means here? SMS or iMessage?
Good point. I would consider SMS, MMS, Phone call & email “normal” but it woulda probably been better if I used a different term, maybe “long established protocols?”
😆 Indian government is so weird.
government is so weird There, fixed it for ya.
Ay yo wtf.
I thought India was a democracy?
🤔
democracy?
The definitions for that seem pretty loose nowadays.
Also made me think of this:
Wtf. Why did you think that?
By every definition of democracy I’m familiar with the Republic of India is a democratic government. Do you think it’s not? If so, why not?
State-sponsoree pogroms. State-sposored censorship of NGOs and journalists.
You can’t have a democracy under fascism, even if that fascist was originally elected by the majority.
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
Strangely enough I can access Element’s website just fine. I’ve heard it being blocked by some ISPs but my ISP hasn’t blocked it (yet). I’m glad that the privacy conscious and open source crowd in India are aware of and use F-Droid so this stupid and illogical ban (which I’ve known about since December of 2023) is easily circumvented. Funnily enough, BJP’s hold over the Indian people seems to be loosening because of some really poor decisions taken by the government after they won last year in the elections, especially with taxes. Satisfying to watch them slowly crumble.
