TechCrunch: ‘Zoom Admits Some Calls Were Routed Through China by Mistake’

Sometimes a headline says it all. This is really one hell of a “mistake”. It’s China. Considering everything we know about China — human rights violations, untrustworthy track record, unaccountable totalitarian leadership, vast resources, and their technical expertise to act, at scale, on access to potentially sensitive poorly-encrypted video calls — China is quite literally and obviously the last country on the face of the earth where you’d want video calls routed.

But I suppose Zoom is probably right, it must have been a mistake — despite the fact that Zoom has over 700 employees in China, including a large portion of its engineering staff; despite the fact that Zoom’s purported end-to-end encryption is no such thing, which means Chinese snoops already have access to the keys used to weakly-encrypt Zoom chats — because Zoom CEO Eric Yuan assured us that Zoom was designed with the security and privacy needs of the enterprise in mind. What a relief.

★ Saturday, 4 April 2020