The judicial order to interrupt the tremendously popular chat service for 72 hours affected nearly 100 million Brazilians
On Monday afternoon, 100 million Brazilians were declined access to the popular messaging service WhatsApp after one state judge decided to suspend the service for 72 hours. Mobile operators that failed to comply with the ruling risked a fine of $142,000 per day.
But after an emergency appeal, the service was back Tuesday afternoon.
About half of Brazil’s population uses the service. In the South American country, WhatsApp is even more popular than Facebook, which owns the app. About 91 percent of Brazilian phone users use the service to chat for free. Worldwide, 900 million users log in WhatsApp every day.
Judge Marcel Maia Montalvão, who issued the order, has eyed Facebook once more a couple of months ago when he ordered the arrest of the company’s VP for South America, Diego Dzodan, for failing to hand over sensitive information to investigators in a drug-trafficking case.
Dzodan was locked up for 24 hours. But he argued before an appellate court that the encryption used by cell phones didn’t allow Facebook to have access to any communication.
In the wake of the recent ruling, WhatsApp executives said that they cannot hand over information that they currently don’t have. According to a national newspaper, the judicial order to shutdown the service for three full days is related to the same drug-trafficking case.
The deadlock, however, stems from a larger controversy over the appropriateness of the use of end-to-end encryption offered by some tech companies to protect their users’ privacy. When such encryption is set in place, only phone users can read the content of their communication, not the companies themselves.
But the move is not well-tolerated by government agencies that are either involved in criminal investigations or mass surveillance programs. The issue often resulted in nasty PR wars such as the Apple-FBI standoff we all have witnessed last month.
Because of end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp was unable to comply with a subpoena that demanded critical information on specific users of the service. So, the situation led to the judicial order that blocked the service nationwide on Monday.
Around the world, some governments are already taking steps to ban end-to-end encryption from their residents’ mobile phones. The White House, as well, has recently contemplated legislation to create backdoor access in encryption for federal agencies.
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