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?
Also, very self-telling, that I said "UAE should do better for UAE's own future sake" to which you responded: "you want to take away UAE's sovereignty!" Hmm, very odd, that.
you are also missing the elephant in the room, whatsapp's claim of end-to-end encryption is a lie
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fuck the UAE. Beautiful people - bullshit governments. Per usual.
> 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.
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).
>In most of the world such photos would be deemed of public interest and shared
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...
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.
And most of those influencers aren't even rich...
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.
10 seconds later
Hang on a minute. We have a king. Nobody can vote!
But the actual article is much more haunting.
Whoa.
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.
It's unfortunate life isn't black and white, but that's the way it is.
> 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...
(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.
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.
wilburx3•1h ago
uyzstvqs•1h ago
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.
jmye•54m ago
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.
breisa•40m ago
svachalek•34m ago
righthand•19m ago
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?