WhatsApp is again blocked in Brazil by court order
The security of the application WhatsApp claims a new victim. Or rather, a few millions of them And it is that a court has once again ordered the blocking of the messaging application in Brazil as punishment for not sharing private information from a judicial investigation that is being carried out around an issue ofdrogas The paradox is that WhatsApp cannot collaborate with the Brazilian justice system because it does not have such information and not because he doesn't want to, as the justice of that country seems to understand.
The order comes from judge Marcel Montalvao, in the region of Sergipe , where a judicial investigation into a drug cartel led him to request the leaking of information by WhatsApp Thus, the order requested access to data from the chats of the people investigated, to which WhatsApp could only explain again that they do not store said data. Issues that encryption from user to user or end-to-end safeguards for good or bad for all.
However, it seems that the judge was not satisfied with the response of WhatsApp, so he ordered theprecautionary closure of the application throughout the country for 72 hours which have already begun counting from the publication of this article.An order that reaches directly to the Internet operators of the country where their blocking is forced, and they may incur fines if they refuse to comply with the judge's mandate.
In light of this, the creator of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, has published on his Facebook page a message in which you are sorry for what happened, and where you claim to be working to return the service of messaging to the more than 100 million Brazilians who have been deprived of it. Of course, he does not miss the opportunity to comment again on the advantages of WhatsApp encryption, stating that the company (or any other person) not only cannot read the messages that users exchange, but does not store the chat history on its servers. That is why it cannot comply with the Brazilian judicial mandate.
This is not the first clash of WhatsApp with the Brazilian justice system. Last December 2015, Brazilian WhatsApp users saw their communications cut off for 48 hours (12 real hours of veto) for the same reason, although with a order from another judge.
However, Marcel Montalvao, the judge who issued the order on this occasion, is not the first time he has faced Facebook, the company that owns WhatsApp In March 2016, the Facebook representative in Latin America, Diego Dzodan, was detained at the airport by order of Montalvao for a similar case, which alleged the company's lack of collaboration with the country's judicial services by not giving away information that not even Facebook had.
Brazilian users have already begun to suffer court decisions by magistrates who seem not to understand how the encryption system of WhatsApp But In every war there are those who manage to take advantage of the situation, and in this case it is again Telegram the application that benefits from the situation, adding more users with each successive ban hour.
Update: The veto of the Brazilian operators to WhatsApp has not fulfilled even 24 hours before the court order was withdrawn. With this, the more than 100 million users in Brazil can now communicate again through the messaging application.
