Would China give them the message historial or just tell the America government to go and fuck themselves m?
The Chinese government doesn’t manage such data. WeChat is owned by Tencent so Tencent would be asked. How do you think a private business would concern itself with such a request? They would comply but China is not Tencent nor is Tencent China.
I don’t think Tencent would do it. While Tencent isn’t the CPC, no doubt that CPC would encourage Tencent to say no.
AFAIK it’s policy in China that their companies operating abroad should respect the local laws of those foreign countries. So if the US requested data on users, which is perfectly legal and doesn’t even need to be disclosed, Tencent would probably comply and the CPC would at least not pressure a company to break the law.
Also, it would be smart to avoid coordinating illegal activity over apps of any kind, encrypted or not, and opt for in-person options.
But when the movement reaches such critical mass, forms of electronic communication will be necessary.
At that point, I’d still recommend something like cryptographed digital radio/mesh networks over internet-based messaging for most illicit organisation unless the infrastructure itself is held by the movement. Internet is too easy to disrupt, and smartphones are a security nightmare. Organising under the conditions of legality through apps is more okay, though.
I understand that is what the law says and that China tells companies operating abroad to steadfastly follow local laws, but I think/hope that China would force Tencent to say no, or at the very least, delay and interrupt the process as much as possible, and wax poetic about how Amerikkka should be able to do this without Tencent’s direct help, and how Amerikkka’s demons have finally caught up to it.
I think if they had data and it was stored in the US they would respect lawful US orders so if the data was with a US entity of WeChat they’d hand it over to the police after getting a warrant and otherwise cooperate.
Most likely the US would already know what they need to however, their big brother spying programs are focused strongly on metadata and networks of people and they’d already know who’s in the groups based on those intercepts.
China would probably not allow such discussions on there in the first place as it could put them in a tight spot diplomatically. End to end encrypted secure messaging is a better choice, although communication by couriers or one time pads may prove more foolproof depending on the threat model due to the surveillance capabilities of cellphones and the Internet these days.
So which apps to use? Signal is not secured as explained here
This new app looks promising, SimpleX: https://simplex.chat/
Signal is good as long as you are OK with traffic analysis, meaning that the government knows when you are and are not talking with other people, and likely from what location and what device. That’s potentially a lot of information for law enforcement but it comes with the territory of using a cellphone. Dessalines’ recommendation of Matrix and XMPP is not a good one, as they don’t have experienced cryptographers and the cryptographic protocol is not any better than Signal’s for this threat model. (XMPP’s best crypto is the Signal protocol, which is fine but doesn’t help against building of the social graph even though it’s not as centralized, due to traffic analysis, and the client is not well implemented. Matrix has historically been a mess and I personally trust the devs even less than Signal’s.) Briar is probably the best available but I haven’t reviewed it in depth. You can also do secure messaging over Tor or a mix network, which provides some privacy properties regarding the social graph, but stochastic correlation is still possible in this case, especially if the messaging service is not used that much, and the clients for this type of messaging are not well established. That’s why for a threat model that includes traffic analysis and a powerful state run counterrevolution, communication methods that don’t involve the internet or phone network at all are probably the best bet, although a lot of these methods are somewhat hampered by the surveillance state anyway. That said, infiltration by federal agents remains the bigger threat in a real Communist party, and which app you choose doesn’t help with that. Even Signal is fine if you have not structured your party to be resilient to infiltration.
Yes, early is the best time to practise opsec
