As WhatsApp hits India's great firewall, other companies may help build it

 In the name of a responsible internet, several will be eager to abet the government in soft censorship.

India’s internet future — free and open, or stymied and controlled — may be decided by a 224-page lawsuit filed by WhatsApp last week.
Saying that it wanted to curb fake news, revenge porn and other ills, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government introduced new rules in February that would compel social media platforms such as Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp to trace chat messages, among other things.

As the three-month deadline for compliance ended, WhatsApp filed its petition in the Delhi High Court. The U.S. company is arguing that being asked to track the originator of a message has no legal sanction. It doesn’t protect people such as journalists and political activists from arbitrary state action. Nor does the rule meet the proportionality test — required now by Indian law following a 2017 Supreme Court verdict — of being the least restrictive infringement of Indians’ fundamental right to privacy.

WhatsApp contends that keeping a log of messages would require it to break end-to-end encryption and save billions of messages sent by its more than 500 million users in India.

How the case is decided in the coming year or so as it winds its way to a verdict followed by an inevitable appeal may come down to the technical details of data transmission. Internet messages consist of two parts: the header and the payload. That unencrypted header, which can be read by any router it passes through, can be thought of as an envelope that shows identifying information, such as originating and destination IP addresses. The payload is the message itself. If it’s unencrypted, anyone can read it along the way. If it’s encrypted, then the message is scrambled using hard-to-crack algorithms.

The government says that fingerprinting each and every message — making it traceable — doesn’t include the content. But WhatsApp pleads that it will still undermine E2E encryption, posing a serious risk to privacy, and would open up WhatsApp (and other chat apps like Signal) not only to government interference but also to hacking attacks.