> publishing information deemed harmful to state interests
Is the charge, which I think kind of speaks for itself. Full on: "You embarrassed us, straight to jail."
In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest and shared by the media then we'd reflect on if our routing is safe/correct and make proportional changes for safety. Not a big deal, nobody is fired, life moves on.
I feel like actions like this are going to hurt the UAE themselves, because how can you improve if there is no dialog? No information to even start a dialog? A lot of hard conversations are NOT going to be had because I guess it is a state secret?
> Is the charge, which I think kind of speaks for itself. Full on: "You embarrassed us, straight to jail."
That's exactly it, and the UAE admits it. The Atlantic covered this last month.[1]
Dubai uses influencers as part of their strategy to market Dubai as a safe place for rich people. There's an influencer visa. There's a government Creators HQ office to help with relocation and permits. Dubai requires an “Advertiser Permit”, which include a ban on publishing anything that “might harm the national currency or the economic situation in the State.”
The BBC showed several influencer videos side by side, all with the same message: "Are you scared? No, because we know who protects us."[1] They're as on-message as Sinclair in the US.
So is AlJazeera, now. Earlier in the war, attacks on Dubai were reported. Now, they don't seem to be, although coverage on hits outside the UAE is good. AlJazeera is run by the UAE government.
The UAE has been cracking down on this for a while, according to Bellingcat.[3] "Think before you share. Spreading rumors is a crime."
The hits on the Burj Al Arab hotel, the Fairmont hotel, and Dubai's airport were too big to hide completely, but UAE authorities did take action against people who posted videos. That was back
in late February - early March. News of later hits appears to have been successfully censored.
The UAE doesn't have a self-advancement culture, it's a capital-backed monarchy that imports pretty much all of its research and production; in other words it piggy-backs on the knowledge produced in other societies. There is no advancement through dialog in the country itself.
They're effectively at war and are freaking out about capital flight which poses a unique existential risk to them especially.
I imagine most countries in that situation would clamp down on freedom of speech and prohibit sharing photos of missile strikes. This would include most of the ones that pay lip service to freedom of speech in peace time.
Ukraine does it to avoid assisting Russian damage assessment and targeting efforts. Avoiding embarrassment is not really part of the equation, especially when they need to push for more international support.
They want to make it so Iran doesn’t know if they successfully hit that Oracle data centre.
But they also want to make it so foreign investors don’t get scared off by the prospect of their data centre getting blown up. Obviously investors will avoid the area so long as missiles are flying - but by coming through the conflict "unscathed" will let them bounce back fast. Likewise with tourism.
Which of these is the bigger motivation? Hard to say. But I gather most drones have cameras, so I imagine Iran have a pretty good idea of where their drones are striking.
They are more likely to get funding from EU if they can make it look like they can win the war.
Which of these is the bigger motivation? Hard to say. But I gather most drones have cameras, so I imagine Russia has a pretty good idea of where their drones are striking.
Its almost like the idea of nations and representative government have been co-opted by sinister forces to advance an agenda that doesn't serve the people.
Perhaps its time humanity evolve beyond this foolishness?
>In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest and shared
OTOH, anyone remember "loose lips sink ships?" Beyond the famous poster, it was backed up by robust censorship laws.[0][1]
You might say it's different since we were at war, but this ignores how the threat model and immediacy is very different in the UAE vs here in the (geographically well protected/isolated) US.
Battle damage assessment, especially if it's timely, is critical information in any conflict. This is especially true for modern drone-based / hybrid asymmetrical conflict.
Loose Lips Sink Ships was itself an information management scheme to avoid informing the public.
The Germans didn't have spies collecting rumors in the US. Nor did they need them during Operation Drumbeat (the U-Boat attack on the US coast). The US was completely unprepared for Drumbeat. They had no harbor defenses, no convoys, inadequate and unprepared coastwatcher and patrol services.
The point of the censorship is to not cause panic among the public as they realized how badly the US was losing. Drumbeat was worse for the US than the attack on Pearl Harbor was, both in terms of lost ships and number of Americans killed. It was about controlling embarrassment for the Navy. American ships were blowing up and sinking within eyesight of shore. Vacationers were finding dead seaman washed up on the beaches of Florida and New Jersey. The military did not want these events turning into major media events.
And to the extent that the censorship was justified, yes, at the very least we were legally in a properly declared war.
Ironically, there was one time the media did cause a massive problem that could have affected the outcome of the war.
The Chicago Tribune sent a reporter to Pearl Harbor after the battle of Midway and managed to learn from some indiscreet senior commanders that we knew where the Japanese fleet was because we cracked their codes.
The reporter published the story in the Tribune. It was pure dumb luck that the Japanese never noticed the story. Roosevelt wanted the reporter and Robert McCormick brought up on espionage charges, but Admiral King asked him not to prosecute because the Japanese didn't seem to notice the article but they'd definitely notice the trial.
This ring was broken up before the US was even in the war. Operation Drumbeat began after the Pearl Harbor attack at the end of 1941 but was most intense in early 1942. There was lots of Bund activity in the 1930s and prior to Pearl Harbor but very little afterwards.
But also, even if there were Bund spies in American ports was unnecessary and unable to provide tactical information to the German U-boats. Unable due to practical limitations of communication. Unnecessary because the US was so ill-equipped for the battle. For instance, the Bund wouldn't have been able to report on the movement of convoys because there were no convoys.
The US still had charted aids to navigation light up, and cities weren't blacked out allowing the submarines to sit off the coast and see US ships silhouetted against the city skyline behind them. A German submarine sailed into New York harbor using a tourist map as a chart!
Germany not only had spies, there were multiple (albeit failed/foiled) sabotage attempts by Germany on US soil.
Part of the issue the US had is the very large (significant percent of the population) 1st gen German immigrant population. There were concerns they would sympathize.
What was actually happening is many of these immigrants were there to get away from Hitler and Germany as it was at the time, so Germany found most of its attempts stymied instead. But they did try.
Iran is going to be getting constant satellite date. They not only have their own satellite surveillance systems, but also will be getting support, probably covert, from a variety of other countries which also have robust satellite networks.
This is solely for "domestic" (which extends well beyond the UAE) PR purposes, and I expect the US is actively encouraging these countries, behind the scenes, to keep losses under wraps.
Feet and inches level precision matters. This is why these kinds of videos are tamped down because they can show how close or far off target a strike was, and is extremely valuable training data.
Additionally, seeing who responded, the agencies they are associated with, and their faces matter as well.
The UAE is an authoritarian state, but this is how most states operate during a state of war. Even Ukraine tamps down on videos and social media being shared of incidents based on the likelihood whether or not it would expose operational details.
It's not in the interests of the UAE to improve. There's the (possibly misattributed? but topical nonetheless) quote by the previous emir of Dubai:
> My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.
They want to prolong the Land Rover phase as long as possible.
Note that they did not "publish" the picture. They shared it in a private group. This is 1984 kind of stuff. This will hurt Dubai's brand way more than any kinetic attack from Iran.
Dubai's brand (before the war) was "you're welcome to come here to make money, but criticize the government and you're out". I'm sure there's a ton of young influencers who don't know the first thing about the place to not have internalized it, but I remember a spate of articles and books about 15 years ago of Westerners falling afoul of the local laws and losing everything.
Yeah, tbh people not scared by stories of people as wealthy and white and Western as then being prosecuted for kissing their unmarried opposite sex partner on the beach or falling out with the wrong person are not going to be worried about how wartime paranoia interacts with airline employees
There are a lot of things that I would expect to hurt Dubai's "brand" but people still travel there. I don't understand why anyone would travel there in times of peace, let alone during war. You don't even need it for connecting flights.
> In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest
You'd absolutely get detained by authorities in Ukraine or Russia for sharing consequences of airstrikes on critical infrastructure. I'm sure other countries would do the same (not that it's good).
A large number of those tend to be vetted. Additonally, frontlines level videos do go through significant vetting and some form of MDM is used on personal phones in the frontlines.
Additionally, on the Ukraine side as well as the Russian side, civilian strike information isn't deemed critical from a NatSec perspective as plenty of Russians and Ukrainians lived on both sides of the border and still have relatives on either side, so both assume the other has granular level knowledge of non-frontline spaces.
obviously, countries have ways to determine BDAs for their attacks, but you don't have to give it to them for free. The concept of oversharing is lost in the age of social media.
It's public interest of Dubainers of not to expose any problems, as the premise of the emirate is built on loose money, loose rules and high life and this kind of money is first to flee in the case of hiccups.
When did Americans care so much about the poor laborers from India? Honest question. The United States is well known for funding a genocide and protecting pedophiles. Do you think they or the people who live there care?
Foreign residents cannot criticize UAE or its government and monarchy in any way, under threat of prison and/or torture.
How is that complicated to understand? It's a brutal regime with a fake Monaco to attract rich tourists, influencers, investors and prostitutes, but the moment you fall in disgrace in the eyes of the authorities, you're done.
> ‘I was beaten and tortured’: how a British father and son made a fortune in Dubai then became wanted men
there are two sides, such as how photos can stress citizens and act as propaganda, making them harmful to state interests, ultimately it is their country and their rules, not yours, regardless of how much you disagree with it
you are also missing the elephant in the room, whatsapp's claim of end-to-end encryption is a lie
The actual text from the article implies that OS exploits compromised the device.
"The UAE government owns majority holdings in telecom companies Etisalat and Du. This gives security services the power to observe all communications on their networks.
"The Arab state has also used the Israeli-developed software Pegasus which allows agents to listen into private calls and read messages, even if they are shared on encrypted apps like WhatsApp,.
"The spyware can infect a device even without the user activating a link - such as via a WhatsApp call, even if it isn't answered.
"Once inside, it can access all WhatsApp messages, logos and contacts."
I don't think that means anything as the author of the article almost certainly has no clue about anything but what the Government there told him. They're just quoting general knowledge and speculation by other equally-uninformed third parties.
Even personal chats are publicly not E2E encrypted.
There are other insidious ways you can publicly and openly end E2E encryption (I think backups might do that).
Essentially, while WhatsApp may not be lying their default 1 to 1 chats are E2E encrypted, it makes sense to use it as if it weren’t because it’s so easy to disable it even with their publicly disclosed information.
Wrong. Both WhatsApp and Signal group chats are E2EE.
Telegram group chats are not. Even 1on1 chats aren‘t E2EE on Telegram by default.
Also, reporting is an issue: If a member of the group "Reports" a message to WhatsApp, a copy of the recent messages in that chat is decrypted and sent to WhatsApp for review to check for terms-of-service violations.
> In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest and shared by the media
Perhaps, but increasingly not here in the US, which used to consider itself the leader of the "Free World".
Trump thinks nothing of declaring journalists terrorists and threatening to take away the broadcast licenses of TV stations that are embarrassing him.
It'd be nice if we could say this is just Trump, a bad president gone gaga, but the Republican party supports him, so unfortunately this authoritarian control of the media seems to be becoming normalized.
> In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest
In peacetime, definitely. In war time, there's a necessary balance to be found between “information as public interest” and “providing free battle damage assessment” to an adversary.
I'm not saying I'm in favor of jailing people for pictures, but we cannot ignore the importance of intelligence in modern combat with ubiquitous precision weapons.
People have similarly been arrested for filming air defense at work in Ukraine, and again it makes sense because giving away key sensitive information for social network cred isn't something you want in a country suffering from a military aggression.
These days when you hear "most of the world.." used as a kind of indirect appeal to common-sense legislation, you just gotta wonder what or who they are talking about anymore.
Its a strange beautiful notion though. That there is some grand consesus out there somewhere, in The-most-of-the-world, where laws are just and rational, where states-of-exception only exist in the kitchens and the classrooms. I just know one day the barrelman will cry out, and we will know we have reached the-most-the-world.
> Radha Stirling, chief executive of London-based advocacy group Detained in Dubai, said Dubai police had "explicitly confirmed they are conducting electronic surveillance operations capable of detecting private WhatsApp messages."
And later it mentions that they "also" use the Pegasus spyware. Although I'm not sure I'd trust that as actual confirmation that this was a separate attack vector. Even if "someone in the chat leaked it" is AIUI the most common way something like this would happen.
> Radha Stirling, chief executive of London-based advocacy group Detained in Dubai, said Dubai police had "explicitly confirmed they are conducting electronic surveillance operations capable of detecting private WhatsApp messages."
To be fair, an operation where you encourage people in group chats to report and share anything suspicious with police would be consistent with "electronic surveillance operations capable of detecting private WhatsApp messages."
They didn't actually crack WhatsApp traffic. Someone in the group probably just reported it.
WhatsApp's insecurities are that Meta has access to a full network graph of all users' contacts, and that it wants to upload an unencrypted backup to Google or Apple by default. If there was an actual backdoor in the closed-source crypto, I highly doubt they'd give Dubai police access to it.
WhatsApp put a (weirdly tame and unremarkable?) image a friend of mine tried to post into review and ended up never letting it show up in a thread, the other day. He was able to post a screenshot of it sitting in his view of the thread, and the message about why it was temporarily delayed (it never showed up, though).
This was in a chat of close friends, not one of those weird huge spammy groups of strangers or something. Nobody was using the report button on him, lol.
We’re all in the US. WhatsApp has some level of awareness of the images you’re sharing, apparently.
I’ll preface this with agreeing that you’re probably correct.
That said, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Meta built an intentional backdoor, and that someone else (or many someone else’s) found it and was utilizing it.
> They didn't actually crack WhatsApp traffic. Someone in the group probably just reported it.
So you don’t know any of this? You have no proof someone in the group reported it. You have no proof they weren’t using a backdoor they found with or without Meta knowing this…
The poster is right, it's very unlikely that WA has been backdoored/cracked, and it seems obvious why.
A backdoor to the world's largest messaging app would be extremely valuable: while it can exist, it's unlikely that it'd be so widely available the UAE police can use it for such insignificant cases. And because of its value, no one with access to it (the US, the UAE, Meta) would want it to become public knowledge through such an insignificant case, because everyone they really want to spy on would switch to Signal in a second.
It’s weird that the notification backdoor never gets talked about, but your Whatsapp messages are decrypted in plain sight when the text content is shipped through the notification services. This is mentioned always for Signal but Whatsapp always gets a pass even though it’s a way more malicious company and indeed probably using that hole to profile/track it’s users.
The only response is “oh no Whatsapp cant leak anything the security model of how chat messages are backed up is a-okay!”
Signal got called out for it because it actually happened to a user with the police. Of course it affects all apps. It's also local, so irrelevant to the discussion of networked/encryption hacks someone alleged above.
My point is that we simply don’t know what the police mean by “broke encryption”. It could be they are able Mitm the notifications server not that they’ve broken the whatsapp double ratchet.
“[w]hen a nation is at war, many things that might be said in times of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.” Schenck v. United States (1919)
"In 1969, Schenck was largely overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio, which limited the scope of speech that the government may ban to that directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot)." - Wikipedia
It's entirely common for the government to wipe their ass with the first amendment during wartime.
> The objective of wartime censorship was to prevent the exposure of sensitive military information to the enemy. Similar censorship had been practiced by the U.S. Army in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. During World War I, however, the press censorship system was formalized and extended, according to the Army's official history, to include anything that might "injure morale in our forces here, or at home, or among our Allies," or "embarrass the United States or her Allies in neutral countries."
It's entirely common for the government to wipe their ass with the first amendment whenever it suits their interests, using whatever plausible-enough pretense they can find.
Hauntingly, they’re actually calling the ME “west asia” now.
In my copy of animal farm, there’s actually a foreword relevant for this discussion. It goes into Orwells difficulty getting things published around ww2 as there was speech that whilst legal was frowned upon during wartime.
“It’s fine because it happened during WWII, the only thing we base history off of to determine limiting rights is fine. Dumber less informed people did it, so should we!”
Yes because with the first amendment, a president can’t sue news organizations for saying mean things and get them to pay him personally $15 million a piece (Paramount/CBS and Disney/ABC) and teachers can’t be fired for quoting racist comments of a dead podcaster.
If you believe Trump wouldn't be doing things like this if America was actually facing direct consequences for its warmongering, I have a bridge to sell you.
I'm of two minds on this. In peacetime, I'd consider something like that to be unreasonable and harmful, not that I'd ever even consider setting foot anywhere on the Arabian Peninsula. But, if anyone has noticed, World War III is raging all around us, and when an enemy who wants to kill you is backing that up with explosive payloads, you really don't want to be handing them battle damage assessments.
Indeed. And interestingly those people also believe this myth that Emirates is somehow always super luxurious. Emirates Economy is just as cattle class as all other large airlines, but with a worse safety record and having to go through Dubai. Just don't do it.
Probably referring to crew rest hours (esp. a problem in the late 2010s, near-misses at DXB etc.
Not having had passenger fatalities is a bad indicator for safety records in the 21st century.
The ek521 report is a good example documenting systemic failures at EK
Well, if not ever having a fatality isn’t good enough, they’re consistently top 10 rated for safety. I just don’t buy ops criticism. It’s fine to not like Dubai, but emirates are provably one of the best airlines.
The censorship is to shield embarrassing info from GCC and American audiences. As others have pointed out, Iran has its own satellites, and allies with satellites that can conduct their own battlefield damage assessments.
If you go to another country, you should be aware of their laws. If you don't like their laws, don't go. Personally, I've never understood Dubai's "charms". Is is Earth's Mos Eisley [1]. The legal system is completely corrupt and The economy is reliant upon slave labor [2].
For example, in Thailand it's a crime to step on the local currency [3]. Why? Because it's technically disrespecting the King, whose face is on the notes. Or in Japan, it's strictly illegal to bring adderall into the country under any circumstances [4].
I guess my point is that I really struggle to find sympathy for people who go to another country and act surprised that it's different to their home country.
The UAE's restrictions on spreading such images as hurting national security actually goes beyond that. Did you know that it's now illegal to criticize Israel in the UAE [5]?
Speaking of which, the US really isn't that much different on that last point [6].
If you have a private conversation to have that would risk you getting arrested, you shouldn't be using WhatsApp or Signal for it. Consider something more obscure, not connected to your phone number or name, and make messages disappear after 24h. Consider SimpleX, Briar, etc. Obviously don't leave any trail or photos on your device either. Moreover, the device shouldn't be reachable via WhatsApp, Signal, SMS, or even a phone number, as these are common vectors for attackers. Your mobile device should probably be using hardened GrapheneOS or something else with sufficient obscurity. Do not make the mistake of activating a SIM or installing any Google app on the device. As a legal disclaimer, do not break the law.
What people do not know or understand about the Arabian Peninsula is that you have essentially zero rights.
People think, "It cannot be that bad" because a lot of money is spent on good PR for the region, and also because they never find themselves in situations where they get to see how little their lives are worth in those places.
You go to a hotel for a week or take a business trip, everyone smiles, the food is good, whatever. You are not going to trigger any of the bad stuff that way. Before you say, "Well, yeah, if you do something egregious...", nope. Something as innocuous as disagreeing with a superior at work could land you in jail. You are 100% at the whim of people who have more power than you over there.
> The UAE government owns majority holdings in telecom companies Etisalat and Du. This gives security services the power to observe all communications on their networks.
> The Arab state has also used the Israeli-developed software Pegasus which allows agents to listen into private calls and read messages, even if they are shared on encrypted apps like WhatsApp,.
This seems to be the key part from a tech standpoint. Notice that it doesn't come out and say whether Pegasus played a part in this particular arrest, or the telecoms, or both, but it seems to be implied.
Also, I'm intrigued by the punctuation error at the end: "...like WhatsApp,." Did an earlier draft go on to list others? Does Pegasus help governments read messages from Telegram? Signal? It would be interesting to know more.
> Does Pegasus help governments read messages from Telegram? Signal?
Yes. It attempts privilege escalation and exfiltrates whatever message contents it can from multiple apps. Signal has some potential resistance to that since messages are encrypted in transit and at rest. The easiest weak link would be displaying message content in notifications, which is optional in Signal.
Interesting, thanks. I guess I'll carry on feeling marginally superior for choosing Signal over the others as my default, while remaining bleak about the overall landscape.
These ME countries are authoritarian hellholes with a thin veneer of civility and modernity. Think I'm exaggerating? How about being randomly dragged off your flight to have your vagina inspected: https://www.arabnews.jp/en/middle-east/article_30004/
Being thrown in jail arbitrarily without much recourse is such a common occurrence it's spawned its won business category: https://www.detainedindubai.org/
I personally would not step foot in any of these places. This article is not news, it's par for the course.
This defensiveness just makes the situation worse. If they came across as at a disadvantage and doing their best that could attract help and admiration. Trying to cover things up while being hostile just makes them look like reactionary creeps with too much power. An unfortunate turn of events in any case.
Not like I like the UAE (I don't), but during this war they made it plenty clear that it is illegal to record and share any videos or pictures of the damage that was caused by the Iranian attacks. Everyone in the country knows this, and I'm sure airlines have procedures to familiarize staff with the laws of the country they're flying to. If they don't, still not the UAE's problem. Don't like the law? Go somewhere else.
(inb4 any arm chair analyst decides this law is a bad law. That's not the point. The police only apply the law and not write it)
Secondly, I doubt this was some sort of high tech operation. More likely someone just snitched and/or some sort of meta data snooping.
Care to back that up? We know they don't encrypt metadata - that's not a secret. Message content however is E2EE - thankfully these things get audited: https://blog.cloudflare.com/key-transparency/
The onus is not on us to prove that it's not E2E encrypted, but on Meta/WhatsApp to prove that it is. The only way they can do that is by open-sourcing the client application, and providing a method for anyone to verify that the binary on their device was built from those sources, without modification.
Anything else is just theater. Anyone who is worried that their communications could get them arrested or attacked cannot safely use something like WhatsApp. There is no way to trust that a third party's keys haven't been added to a conversation, or that the client isn't leaking message content through some other means.
This doesn't prove WhatsApp is encrypted at all. It proves that a directory of public keys is being logged and audited. That's it.
The protocol existing or being referenced doesn't prove it's what the production client is doing. That requires verifying the client code and behaviour end-to-end, not just the key directory.
> publishing information deemed harmful to state interests
Is the charge, which I think kind of speaks for itself. Full on: "You embarrassed us, straight to jail."
In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest and shared by the media then we'd reflect on if our routing is safe/correct and make proportional changes for safety. Not a big deal, nobody is fired, life moves on.
I feel like actions like this are going to hurt the UAE themselves, because how can you improve if there is no dialog? No information to even start a dialog? A lot of hard conversations are NOT going to be had because I guess it is a state secret?
> Is the charge, which I think kind of speaks for itself. Full on: "You embarrassed us, straight to jail."
That's exactly it, and the UAE admits it. The Atlantic covered this last month.[1] Dubai uses influencers as part of their strategy to market Dubai as a safe place for rich people. There's an influencer visa. There's a government Creators HQ office to help with relocation and permits. Dubai requires an “Advertiser Permit”, which include a ban on publishing anything that “might harm the national currency or the economic situation in the State.”
The BBC showed several influencer videos side by side, all with the same message: "Are you scared? No, because we know who protects us."[1] They're as on-message as Sinclair in the US.
So is AlJazeera, now. Earlier in the war, attacks on Dubai were reported. Now, they don't seem to be, although coverage on hits outside the UAE is good. AlJazeera is run by the UAE government.
The UAE has been cracking down on this for a while, according to Bellingcat.[3] "Think before you share. Spreading rumors is a crime."
The hits on the Burj Al Arab hotel, the Fairmont hotel, and Dubai's airport were too big to hide completely, but UAE authorities did take action against people who posted videos. That was back in late February - early March. News of later hits appears to have been successfully censored.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/03/dubai-...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-giBHZ31RMU
[3] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/04/02/war-uae-iran-infu...
how can you improve if there is no dialog
The UAE doesn't have a self-advancement culture, it's a capital-backed monarchy that imports pretty much all of its research and production; in other words it piggy-backs on the knowledge produced in other societies. There is no advancement through dialog in the country itself.
They're effectively at war and are freaking out about capital flight which poses a unique existential risk to them especially.
I imagine most countries in that situation would clamp down on freedom of speech and prohibit sharing photos of missile strikes. This would include most of the ones that pay lip service to freedom of speech in peace time.
Ukraine does this too.
Ukraine does it to avoid assisting Russian damage assessment and targeting efforts. Avoiding embarrassment is not really part of the equation, especially when they need to push for more international support.
> Ukraine does it to avoid assisting Russian damage assessment and targeting efforts.
Isn’t UAE doing this to avoid Iranian damage assessment and targeting efforts also?
The censorship is dual purpose.
They want to make it so Iran doesn’t know if they successfully hit that Oracle data centre.
But they also want to make it so foreign investors don’t get scared off by the prospect of their data centre getting blown up. Obviously investors will avoid the area so long as missiles are flying - but by coming through the conflict "unscathed" will let them bounce back fast. Likewise with tourism.
Which of these is the bigger motivation? Hard to say. But I gather most drones have cameras, so I imagine Iran have a pretty good idea of where their drones are striking.
Isn’t Ukraine’s censorship dual purpose as well?
They are more likely to get funding from EU if they can make it look like they can win the war.
Which of these is the bigger motivation? Hard to say. But I gather most drones have cameras, so I imagine Russia has a pretty good idea of where their drones are striking.
"Avoid embarrassment" is very much why you quench public discourse.
Why worry about it. Sudan has been getting a front seat viewing of "existential risk" for some time now.
Fuck the UAE. Beautiful people - bullshit governments. Per usual.
Its almost like the idea of nations and representative government have been co-opted by sinister forces to advance an agenda that doesn't serve the people.
Perhaps its time humanity evolve beyond this foolishness?
You might say it's different since we were at war, but this ignores how the threat model and immediacy is very different in the UAE vs here in the (geographically well protected/isolated) US.
Battle damage assessment, especially if it's timely, is critical information in any conflict. This is especially true for modern drone-based / hybrid asymmetrical conflict.
[0] https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/spring/m...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship
Loose Lips Sink Ships was itself an information management scheme to avoid informing the public.
The Germans didn't have spies collecting rumors in the US. Nor did they need them during Operation Drumbeat (the U-Boat attack on the US coast). The US was completely unprepared for Drumbeat. They had no harbor defenses, no convoys, inadequate and unprepared coastwatcher and patrol services.
The point of the censorship is to not cause panic among the public as they realized how badly the US was losing. Drumbeat was worse for the US than the attack on Pearl Harbor was, both in terms of lost ships and number of Americans killed. It was about controlling embarrassment for the Navy. American ships were blowing up and sinking within eyesight of shore. Vacationers were finding dead seaman washed up on the beaches of Florida and New Jersey. The military did not want these events turning into major media events.
And to the extent that the censorship was justified, yes, at the very least we were legally in a properly declared war.
Ironically, there was one time the media did cause a massive problem that could have affected the outcome of the war.
The Chicago Tribune sent a reporter to Pearl Harbor after the battle of Midway and managed to learn from some indiscreet senior commanders that we knew where the Japanese fleet was because we cracked their codes.
The reporter published the story in the Tribune. It was pure dumb luck that the Japanese never noticed the story. Roosevelt wanted the reporter and Robert McCormick brought up on espionage charges, but Admiral King asked him not to prosecute because the Japanese didn't seem to notice the article but they'd definitely notice the trial.
>The Germans didn't have spies collecting rumors in the US.
Yes they did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duquesne_Spy_Ring
This ring was broken up before the US was even in the war. Operation Drumbeat began after the Pearl Harbor attack at the end of 1941 but was most intense in early 1942. There was lots of Bund activity in the 1930s and prior to Pearl Harbor but very little afterwards.
But also, even if there were Bund spies in American ports was unnecessary and unable to provide tactical information to the German U-boats. Unable due to practical limitations of communication. Unnecessary because the US was so ill-equipped for the battle. For instance, the Bund wouldn't have been able to report on the movement of convoys because there were no convoys.
The US still had charted aids to navigation light up, and cities weren't blacked out allowing the submarines to sit off the coast and see US ships silhouetted against the city skyline behind them. A German submarine sailed into New York harbor using a tourist map as a chart!
Germany not only had spies, there were multiple (albeit failed/foiled) sabotage attempts by Germany on US soil.
Part of the issue the US had is the very large (significant percent of the population) 1st gen German immigrant population. There were concerns they would sympathize.
What was actually happening is many of these immigrants were there to get away from Hitler and Germany as it was at the time, so Germany found most of its attempts stymied instead. But they did try.
Iran is going to be getting constant satellite date. They not only have their own satellite surveillance systems, but also will be getting support, probably covert, from a variety of other countries which also have robust satellite networks.
This is solely for "domestic" (which extends well beyond the UAE) PR purposes, and I expect the US is actively encouraging these countries, behind the scenes, to keep losses under wraps.
Feet and inches level precision matters. This is why these kinds of videos are tamped down because they can show how close or far off target a strike was, and is extremely valuable training data.
Additionally, seeing who responded, the agencies they are associated with, and their faces matter as well.
The UAE is an authoritarian state, but this is how most states operate during a state of war. Even Ukraine tamps down on videos and social media being shared of incidents based on the likelihood whether or not it would expose operational details.
It's not in the interests of the UAE to improve. There's the (possibly misattributed? but topical nonetheless) quote by the previous emir of Dubai:
> My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.
They want to prolong the Land Rover phase as long as possible.
For what it's worth, the quote is half and half. The full context is that he went on to say he wanted to avoid the second camel.
https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/dubai-sheikhs-words-lost-in...
So in other words; Mercedes-Benz was the peak, and he was estimating a decline trajectory slower than the rise.
Assuming that our civilizations can wean ourselves both from fossil fuels and chemical feedstocks, then the camel may be in their future.
I think the timing stated here is quite optimistic.
Note that they did not "publish" the picture. They shared it in a private group. This is 1984 kind of stuff. This will hurt Dubai's brand way more than any kinetic attack from Iran.
Dubai's brand (before the war) was "you're welcome to come here to make money, but criticize the government and you're out". I'm sure there's a ton of young influencers who don't know the first thing about the place to not have internalized it, but I remember a spate of articles and books about 15 years ago of Westerners falling afoul of the local laws and losing everything.
Yeah, tbh people not scared by stories of people as wealthy and white and Western as then being prosecuted for kissing their unmarried opposite sex partner on the beach or falling out with the wrong person are not going to be worried about how wartime paranoia interacts with airline employees
There are a lot of things that I would expect to hurt Dubai's "brand" but people still travel there. I don't understand why anyone would travel there in times of peace, let alone during war. You don't even need it for connecting flights.
> In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest
You'd absolutely get detained by authorities in Ukraine or Russia for sharing consequences of airstrikes on critical infrastructure. I'm sure other countries would do the same (not that it's good).
Well, in Russia you would most likely accidentally fall out of the window that a careless person left open.
You can open Telegram and watch at videos and photos of almost any Ukrainian strike.
A large number of those tend to be vetted. Additonally, frontlines level videos do go through significant vetting and some form of MDM is used on personal phones in the frontlines.
Additionally, on the Ukraine side as well as the Russian side, civilian strike information isn't deemed critical from a NatSec perspective as plenty of Russians and Ukrainians lived on both sides of the border and still have relatives on either side, so both assume the other has granular level knowledge of non-frontline spaces.
obviously, countries have ways to determine BDAs for their attacks, but you don't have to give it to them for free. The concept of oversharing is lost in the age of social media.
It's public interest of Dubainers of not to expose any problems, as the premise of the emirate is built on loose money, loose rules and high life and this kind of money is first to flee in the case of hiccups.
Problems such as 'Dubai porta-potty'
Honest question. The UAE is well known for very questionable imported labor. Do you think they or the people who live there care?
When did Americans care so much about the poor laborers from India? Honest question. The United States is well known for funding a genocide and protecting pedophiles. Do you think they or the people who live there care?
But how can they improve if they don't let the slaves criticise the state?!
Foreign residents cannot criticize UAE or its government and monarchy in any way, under threat of prison and/or torture.
How is that complicated to understand? It's a brutal regime with a fake Monaco to attract rich tourists, influencers, investors and prostitutes, but the moment you fall in disgrace in the eyes of the authorities, you're done.
> ‘I was beaten and tortured’: how a British father and son made a fortune in Dubai then became wanted men
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/05/british-father...
You're all acting here like UAE is some sort of reasonable country with fair laws, when it's a dictatorship.
We now know what happens to a lot of influencers and wannabes: https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/dubai-porta-potty-influencer...
The car junk yards are also really sketchy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrGCv3sZXAQ
Exactly. A dictatorship with a medieval religious view on human rights related topics.
And most of those influencers aren't even rich...
there are two sides, such as how photos can stress citizens and act as propaganda, making them harmful to state interests, ultimately it is their country and their rules, not yours, regardless of how much you disagree with it
you are also missing the elephant in the room, whatsapp's claim of end-to-end encryption is a lie
The actual text from the article implies that OS exploits compromised the device.
"The UAE government owns majority holdings in telecom companies Etisalat and Du. This gives security services the power to observe all communications on their networks.
"The Arab state has also used the Israeli-developed software Pegasus which allows agents to listen into private calls and read messages, even if they are shared on encrypted apps like WhatsApp,.
"The spyware can infect a device even without the user activating a link - such as via a WhatsApp call, even if it isn't answered.
"Once inside, it can access all WhatsApp messages, logos and contacts."
I don't think that means anything as the author of the article almost certainly has no clue about anything but what the Government there told him. They're just quoting general knowledge and speculation by other equally-uninformed third parties.
Well, how would you a) obtain the incriminating photo, then b) determine that it had been transmitted?
An OS exploit and stat() for an atime would do it.
> you are also missing the elephant in the room, whatsapp's claim of end-to-end encryption is a lie
Not exactly.
E2E is illegal in the UAE, and Meta has only advertised E2E in countries where it can operate E2E freely.
All chat apps that operate in the UAE need to store data locally with full access given to the UAE's Telecom and Interior Ministries.
Group chats are openly not E2E encrypted.
Even personal chats are publicly not E2E encrypted.
There are other insidious ways you can publicly and openly end E2E encryption (I think backups might do that).
Essentially, while WhatsApp may not be lying their default 1 to 1 chats are E2E encrypted, it makes sense to use it as if it weren’t because it’s so easy to disable it even with their publicly disclosed information.
Wrong. Both WhatsApp and Signal group chats are E2EE.
Telegram group chats are not. Even 1on1 chats aren‘t E2EE on Telegram by default.
Also, reporting is an issue: If a member of the group "Reports" a message to WhatsApp, a copy of the recent messages in that chat is decrypted and sent to WhatsApp for review to check for terms-of-service violations.
Sadly I think for those in power it doesn’t hurt them.
>How can you improve if there is no dialogue
Didn't UAE have a phone line to the king that anyone can call?
Sounds like the cost of actually calling it may be higher than I thought though.
I visited and asked a friend there if women can vote. She became very offended. What! Of course we can vote!!
10 seconds later
Hang on a minute. We have a king. Nobody can vote!
The UAE is a bunch of absolute monarchies. You are applying the processes of a democracy to hereditary absolute monarchies.
> In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest and shared by the media
Perhaps, but increasingly not here in the US, which used to consider itself the leader of the "Free World".
Trump thinks nothing of declaring journalists terrorists and threatening to take away the broadcast licenses of TV stations that are embarrassing him.
It'd be nice if we could say this is just Trump, a bad president gone gaga, but the Republican party supports him, so unfortunately this authoritarian control of the media seems to be becoming normalized.
This was posted inside a private group, so I doubt this applies. He should get a good lawyer.
> In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest
In peacetime, definitely. In war time, there's a necessary balance to be found between “information as public interest” and “providing free battle damage assessment” to an adversary.
I'm not saying I'm in favor of jailing people for pictures, but we cannot ignore the importance of intelligence in modern combat with ubiquitous precision weapons.
People have similarly been arrested for filming air defense at work in Ukraine, and again it makes sense because giving away key sensitive information for social network cred isn't something you want in a country suffering from a military aggression.
These days when you hear "most of the world.." used as a kind of indirect appeal to common-sense legislation, you just gotta wonder what or who they are talking about anymore.
Its a strange beautiful notion though. That there is some grand consesus out there somewhere, in The-most-of-the-world, where laws are just and rational, where states-of-exception only exist in the kitchens and the classrooms. I just know one day the barrelman will cry out, and we will know we have reached the-most-the-world.
> Radha Stirling, chief executive of London-based advocacy group Detained in Dubai, said Dubai police had "explicitly confirmed they are conducting electronic surveillance operations capable of detecting private WhatsApp messages."
And later it mentions that they "also" use the Pegasus spyware. Although I'm not sure I'd trust that as actual confirmation that this was a separate attack vector. Even if "someone in the chat leaked it" is AIUI the most common way something like this would happen.
> Radha Stirling, chief executive of London-based advocacy group Detained in Dubai, said Dubai police had "explicitly confirmed they are conducting electronic surveillance operations capable of detecting private WhatsApp messages."
Whoa.
To be fair, an operation where you encourage people in group chats to report and share anything suspicious with police would be consistent with "electronic surveillance operations capable of detecting private WhatsApp messages."
The headline makes it sound as if it could have been useful for terrorism or something. Like "how bombs affect airplanes".
But the actual article is much more haunting.
The “nothing to hide” people need to be real quiet about now.
The irony is this arrest is most probably the first most people have heard of them getting flattened.
They also lost an aluminum plant, of which there are no pictures.
https://www.recyclingtoday.com/news/aluminum-association-com...
Could the weak spot with WhatsApp be that images are saved to a persons device? Also the metadata is not encrypted.
Anything Meta should be binned if you care about yourself.
They didn't actually crack WhatsApp traffic. Someone in the group probably just reported it.
WhatsApp's insecurities are that Meta has access to a full network graph of all users' contacts, and that it wants to upload an unencrypted backup to Google or Apple by default. If there was an actual backdoor in the closed-source crypto, I highly doubt they'd give Dubai police access to it.
WhatsApp put a (weirdly tame and unremarkable?) image a friend of mine tried to post into review and ended up never letting it show up in a thread, the other day. He was able to post a screenshot of it sitting in his view of the thread, and the message about why it was temporarily delayed (it never showed up, though).
This was in a chat of close friends, not one of those weird huge spammy groups of strangers or something. Nobody was using the report button on him, lol.
We’re all in the US. WhatsApp has some level of awareness of the images you’re sharing, apparently.
I’ll preface this with agreeing that you’re probably correct.
That said, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Meta built an intentional backdoor, and that someone else (or many someone else’s) found it and was utilizing it.
If such a backdoor exists, it is probably cryptographically secured to prevent "unauthorized" access. E.g. the xz backdoor was secured like that.
Or that the government offered Meta $50 for a list of agitators and they said why not. Given Meta's track record it's totally on brand.
> They didn't actually crack WhatsApp traffic. Someone in the group probably just reported it.
So you don’t know any of this? You have no proof someone in the group reported it. You have no proof they weren’t using a backdoor they found with or without Meta knowing this…
You’re just here to defend Meta then?
The poster is right, it's very unlikely that WA has been backdoored/cracked, and it seems obvious why.
A backdoor to the world's largest messaging app would be extremely valuable: while it can exist, it's unlikely that it'd be so widely available the UAE police can use it for such insignificant cases. And because of its value, no one with access to it (the US, the UAE, Meta) would want it to become public knowledge through such an insignificant case, because everyone they really want to spy on would switch to Signal in a second.
It’s weird that the notification backdoor never gets talked about, but your Whatsapp messages are decrypted in plain sight when the text content is shipped through the notification services. This is mentioned always for Signal but Whatsapp always gets a pass even though it’s a way more malicious company and indeed probably using that hole to profile/track it’s users.
The only response is “oh no Whatsapp cant leak anything the security model of how chat messages are backed up is a-okay!”
Signal got called out for it because it actually happened to a user with the police. Of course it affects all apps. It's also local, so irrelevant to the discussion of networked/encryption hacks someone alleged above.
My point is that we simply don’t know what the police mean by “broke encryption”. It could be they are able Mitm the notifications server not that they’ve broken the whatsapp double ratchet.
It’s just Occam’s razor chip out
Way easier for one of a group of humans to report than for a conspiracy hack
This is why the First Amendment is so important
“[w]hen a nation is at war, many things that might be said in times of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.” Schenck v. United States (1919)
"In 1969, Schenck was largely overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio, which limited the scope of speech that the government may ban to that directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot)." - Wikipedia
Thank you. It really is disturbing how many people want to take us back to the Wilson era. Civil liberties are a good thing, folks!
The legal term has its own wiki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
Eh, there was a lot of media censorship during WWII.
It's entirely common for the government to wipe their ass with the first amendment during wartime.
> The objective of wartime censorship was to prevent the exposure of sensitive military information to the enemy. Similar censorship had been practiced by the U.S. Army in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. During World War I, however, the press censorship system was formalized and extended, according to the Army's official history, to include anything that might "injure morale in our forces here, or at home, or among our Allies," or "embarrass the United States or her Allies in neutral countries."
https://www.army.mil/article/199675/u_s_army_press_censorshi...
> It's entirely common for the government to wipe their ass with the first amendment during wartime.
Happens even without a war, just saying...
Let me rephrase that: it's entirely common for the government to wipe their ass with the first amendment using war as a pretense.
It's entirely common for the government to wipe their ass with the first amendment whenever it suits their interests, using whatever plausible-enough pretense they can find.
So we give up our rights when at war? Why not always be at war? Eastasia has always been at war with us.
Yes and yes.
It's unfortunate life isn't black and white, but that's the way it is.
Guess why the US now has a "Department of War".
Hauntingly, they’re actually calling the ME “west asia” now.
In my copy of animal farm, there’s actually a foreword relevant for this discussion. It goes into Orwells difficulty getting things published around ww2 as there was speech that whilst legal was frowned upon during wartime.
“It’s fine because it happened during WWII, the only thing we base history off of to determine limiting rights is fine. Dumber less informed people did it, so should we!”
Yes because with the first amendment, a president can’t sue news organizations for saying mean things and get them to pay him personally $15 million a piece (Paramount/CBS and Disney/ABC) and teachers can’t be fired for quoting racist comments of a dead podcaster.
https://cbs12.com/news/local/matthew-theobold-florida-martin...
If you believe Trump wouldn't be doing things like this if America was actually facing direct consequences for its warmongering, I have a bridge to sell you.
After Whatsapp was bought by Facebook why would anyone assume it is still private?
Middle ages, in 2026. Dubai hasn't changed.
I'm of two minds on this. In peacetime, I'd consider something like that to be unreasonable and harmful, not that I'd ever even consider setting foot anywhere on the Arabian Peninsula. But, if anyone has noticed, World War III is raging all around us, and when an enemy who wants to kill you is backing that up with explosive payloads, you really don't want to be handing them battle damage assessments.
If you give away freedom for security you deserve neither
The article's frame is concerning, but is it right to attribute the arrest to zero-click spyware? How is the process of the police's discovery known?
And people wonder why I refuse to connect through Dubai.
Indeed. And interestingly those people also believe this myth that Emirates is somehow always super luxurious. Emirates Economy is just as cattle class as all other large airlines, but with a worse safety record and having to go through Dubai. Just don't do it.
Emirates has never had a passenger fatality. What do you mean worse safety?
Probably referring to crew rest hours (esp. a problem in the late 2010s, near-misses at DXB etc. Not having had passenger fatalities is a bad indicator for safety records in the 21st century.
The ek521 report is a good example documenting systemic failures at EK
Well, if not ever having a fatality isn’t good enough, they’re consistently top 10 rated for safety. I just don’t buy ops criticism. It’s fine to not like Dubai, but emirates are provably one of the best airlines.
The censorship is to shield embarrassing info from GCC and American audiences. As others have pointed out, Iran has its own satellites, and allies with satellites that can conduct their own battlefield damage assessments.
If you go to another country, you should be aware of their laws. If you don't like their laws, don't go. Personally, I've never understood Dubai's "charms". Is is Earth's Mos Eisley [1]. The legal system is completely corrupt and The economy is reliant upon slave labor [2].
For example, in Thailand it's a crime to step on the local currency [3]. Why? Because it's technically disrespecting the King, whose face is on the notes. Or in Japan, it's strictly illegal to bring adderall into the country under any circumstances [4].
I guess my point is that I really struggle to find sympathy for people who go to another country and act surprised that it's different to their home country.
The UAE's restrictions on spreading such images as hurting national security actually goes beyond that. Did you know that it's now illegal to criticize Israel in the UAE [5]?
Speaking of which, the US really isn't that much different on that last point [6].
[1]: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Mos_Eisley
[2]: https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie...
[3]: https://nyccriminallawyer.com/weird-things-to-get-arrested-f...
[4]: https://miusa.org/resource/tip-sheets/japanfocus/
[5]: https://dawnmena.org/how-the-uae-is-suppressing-criticism-of...
[6]: https://www.aclu-nj.org/press-releases/secretary-state-lette...
If you have a private conversation to have that would risk you getting arrested, you shouldn't be using WhatsApp or Signal for it. Consider something more obscure, not connected to your phone number or name, and make messages disappear after 24h. Consider SimpleX, Briar, etc. Obviously don't leave any trail or photos on your device either. Moreover, the device shouldn't be reachable via WhatsApp, Signal, SMS, or even a phone number, as these are common vectors for attackers. Your mobile device should probably be using hardened GrapheneOS or something else with sufficient obscurity. Do not make the mistake of activating a SIM or installing any Google app on the device. As a legal disclaimer, do not break the law.
What people do not know or understand about the Arabian Peninsula is that you have essentially zero rights.
People think, "It cannot be that bad" because a lot of money is spent on good PR for the region, and also because they never find themselves in situations where they get to see how little their lives are worth in those places.
You go to a hotel for a week or take a business trip, everyone smiles, the food is good, whatever. You are not going to trigger any of the bad stuff that way. Before you say, "Well, yeah, if you do something egregious...", nope. Something as innocuous as disagreeing with a superior at work could land you in jail. You are 100% at the whim of people who have more power than you over there.
> "Well, yeah, if you do something egregious...", nope.
Leaving a bad review online for a local business can get you arrested and jailed.
> The UAE government owns majority holdings in telecom companies Etisalat and Du. This gives security services the power to observe all communications on their networks.
> The Arab state has also used the Israeli-developed software Pegasus which allows agents to listen into private calls and read messages, even if they are shared on encrypted apps like WhatsApp,.
This seems to be the key part from a tech standpoint. Notice that it doesn't come out and say whether Pegasus played a part in this particular arrest, or the telecoms, or both, but it seems to be implied.
Also, I'm intrigued by the punctuation error at the end: "...like WhatsApp,." Did an earlier draft go on to list others? Does Pegasus help governments read messages from Telegram? Signal? It would be interesting to know more.
> Does Pegasus help governments read messages from Telegram? Signal?
Yes. It attempts privilege escalation and exfiltrates whatever message contents it can from multiple apps. Signal has some potential resistance to that since messages are encrypted in transit and at rest. The easiest weak link would be displaying message content in notifications, which is optional in Signal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)
Interesting, thanks. I guess I'll carry on feeling marginally superior for choosing Signal over the others as my default, while remaining bleak about the overall landscape.
These ME countries are authoritarian hellholes with a thin veneer of civility and modernity. Think I'm exaggerating? How about being randomly dragged off your flight to have your vagina inspected: https://www.arabnews.jp/en/middle-east/article_30004/
Being thrown in jail arbitrarily without much recourse is such a common occurrence it's spawned its won business category: https://www.detainedindubai.org/
I personally would not step foot in any of these places. This article is not news, it's par for the course.
Its called free BDA, straight up aiding the enemy by correcting his fire.
There is no war in Ba Du Bai.
This defensiveness just makes the situation worse. If they came across as at a disadvantage and doing their best that could attract help and admiration. Trying to cover things up while being hostile just makes them look like reactionary creeps with too much power. An unfortunate turn of events in any case.
Not like I like the UAE (I don't), but during this war they made it plenty clear that it is illegal to record and share any videos or pictures of the damage that was caused by the Iranian attacks. Everyone in the country knows this, and I'm sure airlines have procedures to familiarize staff with the laws of the country they're flying to. If they don't, still not the UAE's problem. Don't like the law? Go somewhere else.
(inb4 any arm chair analyst decides this law is a bad law. That's not the point. The police only apply the law and not write it)
Secondly, I doubt this was some sort of high tech operation. More likely someone just snitched and/or some sort of meta data snooping.
...in Dubai
Seeing millionaires praise Dubai was really eye opening to me. Seems that we don't really value democracy and freedom of speech as much as we pretend.
Give up the entire fucking Constitution for order, low taxes and non unionized servants.
If you think WhatsApp is encrypted, I have a handful of magic beans to sell you.
Care to back that up? We know they don't encrypt metadata - that's not a secret. Message content however is E2EE - thankfully these things get audited: https://blog.cloudflare.com/key-transparency/
The onus is not on us to prove that it's not E2E encrypted, but on Meta/WhatsApp to prove that it is. The only way they can do that is by open-sourcing the client application, and providing a method for anyone to verify that the binary on their device was built from those sources, without modification.
Anything else is just theater. Anyone who is worried that their communications could get them arrested or attacked cannot safely use something like WhatsApp. There is no way to trust that a third party's keys haven't been added to a conversation, or that the client isn't leaking message content through some other means.
This doesn't prove WhatsApp is encrypted at all. It proves that a directory of public keys is being logged and audited. That's it.
The protocol existing or being referenced doesn't prove it's what the production client is doing. That requires verifying the client code and behaviour end-to-end, not just the key directory.