According to a report, the Congress unit in Karnataka has alleged that BJP is using Whatsapp to do horse trading of Congress MLAs in the state. AICC general secretary and Karnataka in-charge KC Venugopal said that BJP’s Karnataka president BS Yeddyurappa is talking to Congress MLAs over Whatsapp. He said, “Yeddyurappa himself is engineering defections. He is using WhatsApp to talk to our MLAs, but he won’t be able to split us and become the chief minister again”.
According to the Congress, BJP is using Whatsapp to contact its MLAs because due to the end-to-end encryption of Whatsapp, conversations done in the app can’t be recorded. Therefore, if some Congress MLA wants to present evidence of being contacted by BJP, they would not be able to provide any proof of it.
Congress alleges that after coming to know that BJP is approaching Congress MLAs for poaching, Congress leadership advised the MLAs to record such conversations so that it can be used as evidence to ‘expose’ BJP. But apparently BJP leadership learnt about this and they started using Whatsapp in poaching operations.
This is one of the most hilarious allegations made by the Congress party in the long list of such allegations. It also shows their ignorance with regards to technology. The end-to-end encryption technology that Whatsapp uses means a third party can’t access communications made using Whatsapp, not even Whatsapp itself. This means the communication made using the app is secure from unauthorised intrusion. But it no way it prevents recording and sharing of those messages by recipients.
Let’s talk about WhatsApp phone calls. If you search the Play Store for apps that can record Whatsapp calls, you will get dozens of results. There are apps that can record video calls also. This means it is very easy to record calls made on Whatsapp. No encryption technology can prevent the recording of audio that is being played on the speaker of the phone.
End-to-end encryption means a third party can’t access the messages. But the receiver and sender of the messages can easily share the messages if they want. If it is text, image, or video message, they can just show those messages to the media. And if it is audio or video call, they can record it easily if they want to expose the horse-trading attempts made by BJP.
If some Congress MLA is saying that BJP is contacting them, but they don’t have proof as it is done using Whatsapp, probably Congress party should organise a training session to train them on how to record Whatsapp communication. They may also teach them how to take a screenshot of text messages.
