<p id="h-the-u-s-doesn-t-need-to-know-who-they-re-targeting-or-show-probable-cause-when-ordering-facebook-whatsapp-or-any-tech-company-to-help-agencies-spy-on-users-in-secret-newly-unsealed-court-documents-show">The U.S. doesn&#8217;t need to know who they&#8217;re targeting or show probable cause when ordering Facebook, WhatsApp or any tech company to help agencies spy on users in secret, newly-unsealed court documents show.



U.S. federal agencies have been using a 35-year-old American surveillance law to secretly track WhatsApp users with no explanation as to why and without knowing who they are targeting.



In Ohio, a just-unsealed search warrant reveals that in November 2021, DEA investigators demanded the Facebook-owned messaging company track seven users based in China and Macau. The warrant reveals the DEA didn’t know the identities of any of the targets, but told WhatsApp to monitor the IP addresses and numbers with which the targeted users were communicating, as well as when and how they were using the app. Such surveillance is done using a technology known as a pen register and under the<a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-II/chapter-206" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&nbsp;1986 Pen Register Act</a>, and don’t ask for any message content, which WhatsApp couldn’t provide anyway, as it is end-to-end encrypted.



As&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/08/03/american-law-lets-us-government-spy-on-whatsapp-without-having-to-explain-why/">previously reported</a>, over at least the last two years, law enforcement in the U.S. has repeatedly ordered WhatsApp and other tech companies to install these pen registers without showing any probable cause. As in those previous cases, the government order to trace Chinese users came with the statement that the Justice Department only needed to provide three “elements” to justify tracking of WhatsApp users. They include: the identity of the attorney or the law enforcement officer making the application; the identity of the agency making the application; and a certification from the applicant that “the information likely to be obtained is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation being conducted by that agency.”



“Other than the three elements described above, federal law does not require that an application for an order authorizing the installation and use of a pen register and a trap and trace device specify any facts,” the government wrote in the latest warrant.



The latest case shows that America’s unexplained snooping has a global reach, far beyond domestic WhatsApp users and those in neighbouring countries, affecting foreign targets whose identities the government does not know. According to another search warrant unearthed by&nbsp;Forbes, one previous case in Ohio saw another seven WhatsApp users targeted, three in the U.S., four in Mexico. For each, the U.S. either knew the alias or the real name of the user.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-chinese-opioid-sales">Chinese opioid sales</h2>



As the Chinese WhatsApp numbers were published unredacted in the search warrant,&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;was able to find indications that the DEA was seeking to carry out surveillance on Chinese individuals and entities shipping opioids on the web and over encrypted apps. One number was included as a contact in a comment from 2020 on a blogpost, offering shipment of pharmaceutical products, providing an email containing the domain of what appears to be a Chinese company. (As no charges have been filed in the case,&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;is not revealing the numbers of the names of the entities being targeted by the DEA probe. The Justice Department in Ohio hadn’t commented at the time of publication.)



Another was listed on a Facebook page where chemicals were being sold by a company promising “research” chemicals. Pictures on the page showed cellophane bags containing various powders and pointing to Telegram and Wickr numbers, as well as the WhatsApp contact, promising high purity substances, including psychoactive drugs benzodiazepines, which include diazepam (better known by its brand name Valium) and alprazolam (also better known as its brand name Xanax.)&nbsp; One of the numbers was also posted to a Facebook group called “dark research chemicals forum,” where users have been discussing how to get hold of various substances, many looking for benzodiazepines.



Though the DEA may be legitimately using the Pen Register Act to track the Chinese chemical suppliers fuelling America’s opioid crisis, there remain concerns about the lack of an explanation of “probable cause.” Yet, despite complaints from the likes of the ACLU about the law going back decades, there’s little sign of any movement on Capitol Hill to address any of the more contentious aspects of the Act. American agencies can, therefore, continue to carry out surveillance on users of one of the world’s most popular messaging apps without having to provide any reason, either to a judge or the public.



This story is part of The Wire IRL feature in my newsletter, The Wiretap. Out every Monday, it’s a mix of strange true crime and real-world surveillance, with all the relevant search warrants and court documents for you to pore over. There’s also all the cybersecurity and privacy news you need to read. 



By Thomas Brewster, Forbes Staff

Logos – Stock Pictures

WhatsApp Ordered To Help US Agents Spy On Chinese Phones—No Explanation Required

Paragon Solutions doesn’t have a website. There’s very little information at all about them online, even if the Tel Aviv-based smartphone surveillance startup’s employees are all over LinkedIn, more than 50 of them. That’s not a bad headcount for a company that’s still in stealth mode.



But it does have a cofounder, director and chief shareholder that will turn heads: Ehud Schneorson, the former commander of Israel’s NSA equivalent, known as Unit 8200. The other cofounders &#8211; CEO Idan Nurick, CTO Igor Bogudlov and vice president of research Liad Avraham &#8211; are ex-Israeli intelligence too. Also on the board is cofounding director and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. They also have a significant American financial backer: Boston, Massachusetts-based Battery Ventures. According to two senior employees at companies in the Israeli surveillance industry, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the venture capital business put in between $5 and $10 million, though Battery declined to comment on the nature of its investment, which is only&nbsp;<a href="https://www.battery.com/list-of-all-companies/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">mentioned in brief on the company’s website</a>.&nbsp;



Paragon’s product will also likely get spyware critics and surveillance experts alike rubbernecking: It claims to give police the power to remotely break into encrypted instant messaging communications, whether that’s WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger or Gmail, the industry sources said. One other spyware industry executive said it also promises to get longer-lasting access to a device, even when it’s rebooted.&nbsp;



The startup, founded in 2019, is quietly building up steam at a time when its ilk in the smartphone hackers-for-hire industry are under heavy fire. The Pegasus Project, a coalition of nonprofits and global publications, this month claimed to have uncloaked worldwide surveillance of journalists, lawyers and high-profile elected politicians by clients of Israel’s best known spyware provider NSO Group. The company’s CEO has rebuffed the claims made by the Project’s partners, saying it had no evidence that its tools were used to target those named in reports, from the wife of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi to French president Emmanuel Macron. The French government has already begun its investigation, but other administrations around the world are now being called on to probe just who was hacked by NSO’s spyware and why. Even before the Pegasus Project, Microsoft president Brad Smith warned the $12 billion industry as a whole represented a threat,&nbsp;<a href="https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/12/17/cyberattacks-cybersecurity-solarwinds-fireeye/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">writing</a>: “An industry segment that aids offensive cyberattacks spells bad news on two fronts. First, it adds even more capability to the leading nation-state attackers, and second, it generates cyberattack proliferation to other governments that have the money but not the people to create their own weapons. In short, it adds another significant element to the cybersecurity threat landscape.”



A senior executive at Paragon, who declined to comment on the record, told&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;that he did not want to talk about its products. He said the company does not yet have customers. But, in an attempt to avoid the trouble NSO has had with some of its clients who were barred over misuse, the executive added that Paragon would only sell to countries that abide by international norms and respect fundamental rights and freedoms. Authoritarian or non-democratic regimes would never be customers, he added.



Two industry sources said they believed Paragon was trying to set itself apart further by promising to get access to the instant messaging applications on a device, rather than taking complete control of everything on a phone. One of the sources said they understood that Paragon’s spyware exploits the protocols of end-to-end encrypted apps, meaning it would hack into messages via vulnerabilities in the core ways in which the software operates.&nbsp;



The company’s staff, according to LinkedIn profiles, have strong backgrounds in surveillance, with its VP of operations and HR lead being ex-NSO, and many of its developers coming from Israel Defense Forces intelligence units. One of its software developers, Alon Weinberg, previously presented research on&nbsp;<a href="https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2027/DEF%20CON%2027%20presentations/DEFCON-27-Alon-Weinberg-Please-inject-me-a-x64-code-injection.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">hacking the software running on Intel and AMD</a>&nbsp;chips at famous U.S. hacking conference Def Con.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-israeli-surveillance-on-american-money">Israeli surveillance on American money</h2>



With an American backer, it appears Paragon is going to try and crack American law enforcement agencies where others like NSO have failed. According to a LinkedIn profile, a 30-year veteran of Israeli intelligence, Menachem Pakman, has been employed to help find business in the U.S. There’s no indication that they have clients across the Atlantic yet, however.



According to the corporate filing for the company, Battery invested via two of its venture capital vehicles in September 2019, indicating it helped launch the business, while its Israel-based vice president Aaron Rinberg is a board observer at Paragon. Battery, which has raised more than $9 billion since its founding in 1983, has claimed some hugely successful investments in its time, including Coinbase, Groupon, Splunk, SkullCandy and Pokémon Go creator Niantic. The company hadn’t commented on its investment in the Israeli smartphone surveillance game at the time of publication.



John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School, said that if the aim of Paragon’s business is to help American agencies target Americans, then it needs to be scrutinized. “Any American investor that is putting money into the industry right now, urgently needs serious scrutiny. We are going to need to know who their customers are. We’ve learned what happens when the industry operates in secrecy and says they care about protecting human rights,” he said. “The hack-for-hire industry has gone way far out on a legal limb.” The Paragon executive said the company would not disclose future customers.



Paragon isn’t the first Israeli company to take American venture capital on launch. Toka, which focuses on helping law enforcement hack into Internet of Things devices like Amazon Echos for forensics or during property raids,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/07/15/toka-will-hack-internet-of-things-for-government-intelligence-agencies/">raised $12.5 million in 2018</a>, in a round that included funding from Dell Technologies Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. NSO, meanwhile, was majority-owned by U.S. private equity firm Francisco Partners until a U.K. private equity company, Novalpina Capital, took control.



Paragon’s leadership are also in the interesting position of working for both cyber defense and offensive companies. In 2019, the same year they set up Paragon, <a href="https://www.hunters.ai/latest-news/hunters-ai-raises-5-4m-seed-round" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Nurick and Schneorson unveiled a company they had cofounded, Hunters.ai</a>, a startup promising artificial intelligence that can hunt down hackers on a network and is backed by Microsoft’s investment arm M12. (After publication, a current investor in Hunters.ai told Forbes both departed the company early on and have no shares or involvement in the business.) Schneorson was also named as an advisor for ZecOps, a mobile security business that has, in the past, uncovered phone hacks developed by surveillance businesses. (ZecOps CEO Zuk Avraham hadn’t responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.)



By Thomas Brewster, Forbes Staff

Young woman working at home

Meet Paragon: An American-Funded, Super-Secretive Israeli Surveillance Startup That ‘Hacks WhatsApp And Signal’

Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg is planning to unify the underlying messaging infrastructure of the WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger services and incorporate end-to-end encryption into these apps, the New York Times reported.



The three services will, however, continue as stand-alone apps, the report said, citing four people involved in the effort.



Facebook said it is working on adding end-to-end encryption, which protects messages from being viewed by anyone except the participants in a conversation, to more of its messaging products, and considering ways to make it easier for users to connect across networks.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">“There is a lot of discussion and debate as we begin the long process of figuring out all the details of how this will work,” a spokesperson said.</blockquote>



After the changes, a Facebook user, for instance, will be able send an encrypted message to someone who has only a WhatsApp account, according to the New York Times report.



Integrating the messaging services could make it harder for antitrust regulators to break up Facebook by undoing its acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram, said Sam Weinstein, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.



“If Facebook is worried about that then one way it can defend itself is to integrate those services,” Weinstein said.



But Weinstein said breaking up Facebook is viewed as an “extreme remedy” by regulators, particularly in the United States, so concerns over antitrust scrutiny may not have been a factor behind the integration.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">MAJOR TRADEOFFS</h4>



Some former Facebook security engineers and an outside encryption expert said the plan could be good news for user privacy, in particular by extending end-to-end encryption.



“I’m cautiously optimistic it’s a good thing,” said former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now teaches at Stanford University. “My fear was that they were going to drop end-to-end encryption.”



However, the technology does not always conceal metadata &#8211; information about who is talking to whom &#8211; sparking concern among some researchers that the data might be shared.



READ MORE |<a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/technology/2017/07/24/really-easy-anyone-censor-whatsapp/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Why It’s Really Easy For Anyone To Censor WhatsApp (opens in a new tab)">Why It’s Really Easy For Anyone To Censor WhatsApp</a>



Any metadata integration likely will let Facebook learn more about users, linking identifiers such as phone numbers and email addresses for those using the services independently of each other.



Facebook could use that data to charge more for advertising and targeted services, although it also would have to forgo ads based on message content in Messenger and Instagram.



Other major tradeoffs will have to be made too, Stamos and others said.



Messenger allows strangers to contact people without knowing their phone numbers, for example, increasing the risk of stalking and approaches to children.



Systems based on phone numbers have additional privacy concerns, because governments and other entities can easily extract location information from them.



Stamos said he hoped Facebook would get public input from terrorism experts, child safety officers, privacy advocates and others and be transparent in its reasoning when it makes decisions on the details.



“It should be an open process, because you can’t have it all,” Stamos said. -Reuters



-Munsif Vengattil, Jan Wolfe and Joseph Menn 



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MALAYSIA-US-INTERNET-SOCIAL-APPS

Zuckerberg to integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger

China started censoring certain parts of WhatsApp, according to <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40651951" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">reports</a>. Though there was no comment from the state, many presumed it came as part of a broader response to outcry over the death of political prisoner and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo.
Using the so-called Great Firewall of China, or another part of its vast censorship apparatus, China managed to stop users sending WhatsApp video messages and other multimedia. But, given Facebook&#8217;s added security, including its <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2016/04/06/whatsapp-brings-full-end-to-end-encryption-for-all-one-billion-users/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">end-to-end encryption</a> of WhatsApp messages, how could the Chinese censor images and video while allowing the app to otherwise function as normal?
Turns out, it&#8217;s very simple, according to computer science student and security researcher Frieder Steinmetz. He put together a video showing the possible method China is using, just on a massive scale. It simply redirects a phone&#8217;s access to the media files server used by WhatsApp, causing video and photo downloads to fail.
<iframe loading="lazy" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kcdJL2FbJ6g?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
He redirected connections trying to reach &#8220;mmg.whatsapp.net&#8221; and &#8220;mms.whatsapp.net&#8221; &#8211; the servers for downloading multimedia content &#8211; to the IP address 10.0.0.1. This was done with his own firewall. Afterwards, he removes the redirection via the web interface of his firewall. That&#8217;s when the images can again be downloaded.
Obviously, this is a small-scale experiment. But it&#8217;s likely China could simply expand it using their control over the country&#8217;s internet. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know the first thing about China&#8217;s censorship infrastructure but I imagine it is pretty easy to accomplish,&#8221; Steinmetz added.
Could WhatsApp do more to fight such censorship? Possibly. WhatsApp&#8217;s encryption is based on that of another popular messaging app, Signal. The creators of that tool have a neat trick for preventing forms of censorship. A source familiar with the app&#8217;s workings said Signal chooses to host services on Google servers alongside a lot of others. No one can see which service is being used by a particular user as the connection is encrypted.
That means that if a country wanted to sensor a unique service, like Signal videos, then they&#8217;d have to block the whole Google server, knocking out all those others running on the same machine. Even for China that&#8217;d be a risky move, causing all kinds of international outrage, beyond that already felt over its latest censorship broadside.
WhatsApp declined to comment for this article. &#8211; Written by <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Thomas Fox-Brewster</a>, FORBES STAFF

Why It’s Really Easy For Anyone To Censor WhatsApp

It’s a question that had to be answered sooner or later, the silent question in most entrepreneurs’ minds. It’s a topic I have  discussed privately, but now it’s something I think should be explored publicly.
If you look at the tech capitals of the world – Silicon Valley, Seoul and Tel Aviv – you won’t find any globally renowned black technology entrepreneurs.
It concerns me that a black entrepreneur has not come up with a major breakthrough in technology and gained a personal net worth of over a billion dollars as a result. Bear in mind, I did not say millions as there are many around today who are worth that.
Money is not the defining criteria though. To get to the bottom of this question we need to look at innovation, an idea that took the world by storm like WhatsApp.
Being African is also not in question, the continent has entrepreneurs such as Mark Shuttleworth and Elon Musk who have delivered powerful tech innovations and have billions in their pocket to prove it.
In order to answer the question, we need to confront three issues, cronyism, racism and nepotism. Firstly, they exist; we can’t run away from them.
Nepotism is a global issue. Everyone supports who they know, even people of color. This means that the success of a previous generation cascades to the generation that follows. This continues any race’s probability of success.
Many believe that racism is preventing black Africans from rising to the top. This belief is wrong. Asians and Jews at one point suffered tremendous discrimination, but they succeeded despite that challenge. Today, those two ethnicities are leading the business world.
Another challenge faced by many tech companies started by black entrepreneurs is the moment they come up with an idea, they are immediately thinking of ways to monetize it. You have to make money because you have bills to pay and there is the pressure of friends and family members wanting to see the fruit of what you have been working on.
At the main goal of the most successful tech companies, like Google, Quora and LinkedIn, their main goal was to get  as many people to use their technology as possible. Once that was achieved, they started to figure out how to make money from them. WhatsApp and Quora are still trying to figure this out, but they have millions of users to work with.
Investors in the United States encourage that. You need to attract interest first, monetization will be figured out afterwards and together. The message is that they will give you money if you can show your users have an active interest. Unfortunately, this is not the case in all countries around the world.
I believe Africans are brilliant. We, however, need an ecosystem that can be supportive for all ethnicities on the continent, not just black people. Nairobi and Cape Town are beacons in Africa for the vibrant tech ecosystem they have enabled in their cities. These ecosystems were largely built by the entrepreneurs themselves.
There are two black entrepreneurs who started major technology companies that should be mentioned, David Steward from the United States and Mike Adenuga from Nigeria. Steward runs World Wide Technology, the largest black-owned company in America, with revenue of $7.4 billion in 2015. World Wide Technology is tech service based.
Adenuga, with a personal worth of $3.8 billion, runs telecommunication company Globacom, with over 30 million subscribers. It is not a global brand and it doesn’t have to be.
My point is Africans are created equally and have conquered almost every industry. Competing with the rest of the world should be a challenge, not a competition. Let’s collaborate, with each other and counterparts of all backgrounds, to advance this world technologically.

Tag: WhatsApp

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

WhatsApp Ordered To Help US Agents Spy On Chinese Phones—No Explanation Required

Meet Paragon: An American-Funded, Super-Secretive Israeli Surveillance Startup That ‘Hacks WhatsApp And Signal’

Zuckerberg to integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger

Why It’s Really Easy For Anyone To Censor WhatsApp

Where Is The Black Mark Zuckerberg?