“Why has Google refused to be transparent about its ability to provide wiretaps for Hangouts?”
May 11, 2015 // 03:45 PM EST
In the wake of all the Edward Snowden revelations, a seemingly endless series of encryption apps, all promising some degree “NSA-proof” security, have come out trying to take advantage of this new anti-surveillance business opportunity.
But despite some apps’ relative success, the reality is that most people probably just use mainstream messaging apps like iMessage or Google Hangouts.
Apple has long maintained that conversations over iMessage and Facetime use end-to-end encryption, meaning “no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them,” as the company said after the PRISM revelations. That claim has turned out to be partly true: normally, Apple can’t read your iMessages, but they can if they really want to.
Google, on the other hand, has been mostly silent—there have been no boastful public statements—about the security of its popular Hangouts service, which can be used for both text-based as well as audio-video conversations. In its support documentation, Google simply says that “when you message or talk with someone on Hangouts, your information will be encrypted so that it’s secure,” but there’s no mention of end-to-end encryption.
That’s why Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union and an expert of surveillance technology, took advantage of a Reddit AMA to try to get Google to clarify how secure and private Hangouts really are.
“Why has Google refused to be transparent about its ability to provide wiretaps for Hangouts?”
“Why has Google refused to be transparent about its ability to provide wiretaps for Hangouts?” Soghoian asked Richard Salgado, Google’s director for law enforcement and information security, and David Lieber, the senior privacy policy counsel on Friday. “Given Google’s rather impressive track record regarding surveillance transparency, the total secrecy regarding the company’s surveillance capabilities for this product is quite unusual.”
But Salgado dodged the question, saying Hangouts is encrypted “in transit” and that “there are legal authorities that allow the government to wiretap communications.”