There is no technical reason why something like whatsapp can't be peer-to-peer. Choosing for a centralized service is implicitly choosing for giving the powers that be the opportunity to massively listen in on our various modes of conversation, to figure out your 'graph' and/or to allow censorship.

An old quote has that the internet sees censorship as a routing problem and will route around the break. But that only works if we explicitly refuse to allow centralized services.

I could kind of see how the plaintext communication makes bribery and similar things harder (which is what RTI should prevent), but if that's the reasoning it seems to be really backwards.

On the other hand, the arguments against encryption seem to be that it cripples the Government agencies in their work against terrorists, which is a genuine concern.

There seems to be no way to address both these major concerns (that I am aware of), and hence the battle between privacy advocates and the camp against encryption in the name of national security will continue.

Banning a single service such as WhatsApp is not a solution to this problem. If someone really wants their communication to be encrypted, they can easily make it happen using the numerous tools available, and there is nothing the Government can do about it.

If users obtained thier software elsewhere, the system could still "ban" it, but people would still obtain it.

With the app stores, it becomes fairly easy for a government to unilaterally ban a piece of software.

"Almost" impossible is a stretch. It's regarded as impractical regardless of computational power or other available resources with current computational technology. We might as well not even try.

> Decrypting a single 256-bit encrypted message would take hundreds of years, Yadav said.

That's an interesting way to phrase it.

Bruce Schneier wrote a book called Data and Goliath and touches on the subject a bit. Simply to many false positives are detected.

But how will governments decrypt communications you say?

Simple, they hack the devices performing the communication, if they are important enough. They can then get the key if needed. Encryption forces governments to do targeted surveillance.

This isn't just about whats app, it's about all crypto systems. Without privacy, you have no liberty.

But well, I am from europe, looking forward to you kicking out your security industry and outsourcing it to us. Thanks for that.

I am saying that a provision should be given for government or any agency if it helps saving people's lives but only with a warrant or better scrutiny for the request. Shouldn't that be the case?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/jun/14/nsa-...

That argument does not hold under the current constitution of India. Under the guise of one threat or another (terrorists, corruption, protection of classes of people) the government has nullified all our rights. On the one hand the government is quite open about its maliciousness. On the other hand, unlike the First World governments, the government is honest about the rights it grants us. We don't have a situation where the constitution guarantees something, and the law enforcement agencies violate it.

The bottom line: if you care about your privacy, don't depend on the government, wherever you are.

Generalizing this argument a bit, banning encryption is also not a solution to this problem. The cat is, as they say, out of the bag, and unless we're going to burn every cryptography book and remove every website documenting cryptographic methods or hosting cryptography code, there's no putting it back [1].

1: Presuming the development of effective post quantum cryptography cannot be prevented and distributed, which considering the current state of PQC seems unlikely.

Sounds more like we're returning to a state of how things were (suspicions would have to be aroused, and actual police work would have to be done, instead of just retrieving all of the relevant metadata on people the State doesn't like from a database of just about every piece of information transmitted across a wire for 50+ years).

In this hypothetical scenario, humanity has developed the ability to remotely project thoughts to designated individuals. No technology is involved. Interception of projected thoughts is simply not possible. Plans are made, and then time comes for executing the plan, which must by necessity occur in the physical world.

Per your position, prevention of destructive acts by sociopathic actors in the above hypothetical world is not possible?

The freedom to associate and communicate unhampered by special interests -- corporate or governmental -- is a fundamental requirement of free societies. This fundamental requirement trumps every other consideration. For example, in the above hypothetical world, the society at large still has recourse to other means to detect and prevent destructive action. However in the world that you seem to be proposing, perfectly sane and reasonable actors can be trivially denied from the exercise of the fundamental right of free speech, communication, and association.