‘US authorities also struggle with encryption in WhatsApp’
The US Department of Justice is said to have run into a wall in an investigation where a judge has granted permission to tap a phone with WhatsApp. Despite the court order, the application’s end-to-end encryption is hindering the investigation.
The news comes out through sources from The New York Times. They speak on condition of anonymity because the information about the case is currently still strictly confidential. The Department of Justice is said to have not yet made a decision on how exactly to overcome the encryption of WhatsApp. Peter Eckersley, a researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the American newspaper that “the FBI and DOJ are waiting for the right conditions to require technology companies to build a backdoor to defeat encryption. The request should seem reasonable.” New York Times sources at the US Justice Department deny this.
It is not clear what the case is about. The sources say that in any case it is not about terrorism, but about crime. It is also unknown where in the US the case takes place.
WhatsApp has standard support for end-to-end encryption in its chat conversations since late 2014. This means that only the sender and recipient of a message hold the key and can see the content of a conversation. The data exchanged between two devices could be intercepted or copied from WhatsApp’s servers, but as long as the encryption is not cracked, the data is worthless. The data storage on WhatsApp’s servers is temporary; this is intended to give the recipient’s phone time to actually receive the message. WhatsApp is also working on encryption for its VoIP phone calls.
Earlier this month, the director of Facebook’s Latin American division was also arrested in Brazil. A Brazilian court demanded that Facebook hand over certain information from WhatsApp. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. It would be conversations between members of an alleged drug gang. However, Facebook simply couldn’t help the Brazilian authorities; the data was already automatically removed from the servers and encryption made it unreadable anyway. The man was released after 24 hours in custody and there are no charges against him.
The battle between American tech companies and authorities has been raging for some time. Central to this are the FBI and Apple. It is about the iPhone 5c of the man who shot 14 people in San Bernardino in December. The FBI can’t access the data and the organization can’t crack the phone either. Apple would therefore have to develop special firmware to access the data. Major tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft are behind Apple and are completely against building in a backdoor that authorities can use to track down criminals and terrorists. According to them, the danger of misuse of such a backdoor is very great. President Obama on Friday called for cooperation between the two sides.