“While the Justice Department wages a public fight with Apple over access to a locked iPhone, government officials are privately debating how to resolve a prolonged standoff with another technology company, WhatsApp, over access to its popular instant messaging application, officials and others involved in the case said,” Matt Apuzzo reports for The New York Times.
“No decision has been made, but a court fight with WhatsApp, the world’s largest mobile messaging service, would open a new front in the Obama administration’s dispute with Silicon Valley over encryption, security and privacy,” Apuzzo reports. “WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, allows customers to send messages and make phone calls over the Internet. In the last year, the company has been adding encryption to those conversations, making it impossible for the Justice Department to read or eavesdrop, even with a judge’s wiretap order.”
“As recently as this past week, officials said, the Justice Department was discussing how to proceed in a continuing criminal investigation in which a federal judge had approved a wiretap, but investigators were stymied by WhatsApp’s encryption,” Apuzzo reports. “‘The F.B.I. and the Justice Department are just choosing the exact circumstance to pick the fight that looks the best for them,’ said Peter Eckersley, the chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that focuses on digital rights. ‘They’re waiting for the case that makes the demand look reasonable.'”
“Those who support digital privacy fear that if the Justice Department succeeds in forcing Apple to help break into the iPhone in the San Bernardino case, the government’s next move will be to force companies like WhatsApp to rewrite their software to remove encryption from the accounts of certain customers,” Apuzzo reports. “‘That would be like going to nuclear war with Silicon Valley,’ said Chris Soghoian, a technology analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The U.S. government’s War of Privacy must stop or the only thing Orwell will have gotten wrong was the year.
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