I would imagine Mark of all people to at least do some amount of competitive analysis. It's like being surprised Elon test drove a BMW i3.

If Elon test drove a BMW i3, we'd be hearing about it direct from him via a snarky tweet.

Hmmm…

    $ curl -s https://elonmusk.today/ | grep BMW
    $

:(

I was only joking but you have made a valid point.

Without regard to the security of any of the protocols, Zucj may have just installed to play with it.

Maybe he trusts FB, but has some friends that use Signal.

He is probably aware that other Facebook employees can crack into Whatsapp traffic at will. It might be unwise to be caught doing it to his account; and probably best to make it look like it was somebody else doing it.

We're going to need a citation for this claim

Is that a threat? Who is "we"?

Obviously I have no way to show you Facebook proprietary source code, but equally obviously Facebook can make their code do anything they like, including MITMing on an account-by-account basis.

That is always true when all the code in use is controlled by a single closed organization.

> Is that a threat? Who is "we"?

Nope, just an expectation that sweeping claims get backed up either by reasoning (like you just did) or a source

As for your reasoning vs your claim: you had made it seem like there was some well-known flaw or tool within FB to disable/intercept E2E. Or that we should expect an E2E-disabler functionality already exists.

I'm no FB developer, but I doubt it's as simple as one or two rogue developers adding in an "intercept mark's messages" functionality.

> That is always true when all the code in use is controlled by a single closed organization.

Fair enough, but FB/whatsapp messengers are probably some of the most scrutinized by third parties, as well as developers who would sooner or later blow the whistle (would hope so anyway). I would not take "mark is on signal so his messengers suck" to be a reasonable conclusion - and I'm not even FB's biggest fan.

Do you imagine it is even possible that FB has not yet been served a National Security letter demanding backdoor access, on demand, to any WA account of the spooks' choice? Or that there would be any technical difficulty in complying with such an order?