SoylentNews

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Guardian was wrong to report in January that the popular messaging service WhatsApp had a security flaw so serious that it was a huge threat to freedom of speech.

But it was right to bring to wide public notice an aspect of WhatsApp that had the potential to make some messages vulnerable to being read by an unintended recipient.

The Guardian did not test with an appropriate range of experts a claim that had implications for the more than one billion people who use the Facebook-owned WhatsApp.

In a detailed review I found that misinterpretations, mistakes and misunderstandings happened at several stages of the reporting and editing process. Cumulatively they produced an article that overstated its case.

The Guardian ought to have responded more effectively to the strong criticism the article generated from well-credentialled experts in the arcane field of developing and adapting end-to-end encryption for a large-scale messaging service.

The original article – now amended and associated with the conclusions of this review – led to follow-up coverage, some of which sustained the wrong impression given at the outset. The most serious inaccuracy was a claim that WhatsApp had a "backdoor", an intentional, secret way for third parties to read supposedly private messages. This claim was withdrawn within eight hours of initial publication online, but withdrawn incompletely. The story retained material predicated on the existence of a backdoor, including strongly expressed concerns about threats to freedom, betrayal of trust and benefits for governments which surveil. In effect, having dialled back the cause for alarm, the Guardian failed to dial back expressions of alarm.

This made a relatively small, expert, vocal and persistent audience very angry. Guardian editors did not react to an open letter co-signed by 72 experts in a way commensurate with the combined stature of the critics and the huge number of people potentially affected by the story. The essence of the open letter and a hyperlink to it were added to the article, but wider consultation and a fundamental reconsideration of the story were needed.

-- submitted from IRC

Previously: WhatsApp Vulnerability Allows Snooping on Encrypted Messages -- Or Does it?

Original Submission