Back in February a year ago, a judge in Brazil threatened WhatsApp with suspension, but didn’t close the reasons at the time. Because WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted, Facebook can not access users’ messages and therefore can not provide the court with the requested data. WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook Inc., is the most-used messaging app in Brazil.
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“It’s shocking that less than two months after Brazilian people and lawmakers loudly rejected blocks of services like Whatsapp, history is repeating itself”, he posted.
WhatsApp was defiant, calling the order an “indiscriminate” threat to “people’s ability to communicate, to run their businesses and to live their lives”.
The long-running dispute between Whatsapp and Brasilia is rooted in the authorities’ insistence that they need access to communications between alleged criminalsm. The company said it hoped “to see this block lifted as soon as possible”.
Judge Barbosa blasted Facebook as irresponsible for refusing “to provide information that will be critical to the success of an investigation and later to bolster the criminal case”.
Lewandowski ruled after the service had been blacked out nearly four hours.
Still, the criminal judge left some 100 million Brazilian users without access to the messaging app for hours on Tuesday afternoon, showing the vast and unpredictable discretionary power of Brazil’s lower courts. Since the beginning of the year, the company has also implemented encryption to the messages to increase security.
What makes things worse is that the judge in this case took offense at the way WhatsApp responded to the court’s demands.
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A judge in the district of Caxias do Sul, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, ordered the application suspended for an indeterminate time on the company’s failure to comply with government requests to grant access to users’ private communications. Apparently, the company was treating Brazil like a “banana republic”.
