While a public fight continues between Apple Inc. and the Justice Department over a locked phone, there is a private debate ongoing amongst government officials on how to deal with a prolonged standoff with WhatsApp, another technology firm. According to officials’ part of the case, this is about access to its popular instant messaging application. Even though a decision hasn’t been made as yet, the Obama administration would be opening a new front in its dispute with Silicon Valley over security, encryption and privacy if it decides to begin a court fight with Apple, the largest mobile messaging service in the world.
Owned by Facebook, WhatsApp enables customers to send messages and make phone calls via the internet. In the past year, encryptions have been added to these conversations, which makes it impossible for the Justice Department to eavesdrop or read, even if they have a wiretap order from a judge. Officials said that in the past week, there have been discussion by the Justice Department on how to proceed in a continuing criminal investigation where a wiretap has been approved by a federal judge, but WhatsApp encryption had stymied investigators. Both WhatsApp and the Justice Department declined to comment.
The discussion of this dispute was done by government officials and some others on the condition of anonymity as the wiretap order and all information associated with it is currently sealed. The location and also the nature of the case and investigation remains unclear, but the officials did say that it wasn’t a terrorism investigation. The battle lines can easily be understood in terms of the pre-digital world; the Apple dispute is similar to whether the F.B.I. can come into your house and search it whereas the WhatsApp dispute is like whether they can listen to your phone calls. There is no clear answer for either question in this era of encryption.
The WhatsApp issue is considered even more significant than Apple’s by some investigators because it revolves around the future of wiretapping. They believe that the Justice Department should request a judge to force WhatsApp to break the encryption. However, others are not eager to escalate the problem especially when the senators have said that they are going to introduce legislation for helping the government in getting data in a format that can be easily read and understood.
Whether the dispute with WhatsApp does end up in a court battle and sets precedents, a number of security experts and law enforcement officials say that such a case is going to happen sooner or later as the wiretapping laws were last updated generations ago when landline telephones were used for communication and were easy to tap. They said that the Justice Department and F.B.I. are choosing the best circumstances for them to pick a fight and they are just hunting for a case that makes their demand seem reasonable. But, this notion was disputed by a senior law enforcement official who said that litigation could be avoided and was not inevitable.
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