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

  • Snot Flickerman
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    5 days ago

    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.

    • Ritsu4Life@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 days ago

      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

      • Snot Flickerman
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        5 days ago

        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.

      • Autonomous User@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        Why I was using Signal

        WhatsApp, Instagram and Discord are used by terrorists, iOS and Windows too.

        Join the police. Make all your friends join the police. Report your new boss for terrorism.

      • EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
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        5 days ago

        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.

      • Stewbs@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        That is very concerning. I always chuckle to myself whenever I hear this “terrorist” pov thrown around. Like, okay? So many things are used by terrorists, let’s just ban them all! It’s like when a bill shows up in the US with the aim of “protecting children” (read: increasing surveillance and taking away your privacy)

        Btw if you don’t mind me asking, which state are you from? I’m from the North and I’ve not heard of this till now. Would love to know. Stay safe out there man, India is going through a lot of shit right now.

    • Norah (pup/it/she)
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      4 days ago

      *aussie.zone has entered the chat*

      (did you also know our instance admins are Australian?)