The fight is heating up between tech companies and law enforcement agencies over encryption and data access. Apple Inc and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been hugging the headlines lately on this arena. But another protagonist is emerging on the horizon - Facebook and WhatsApp.
An emerging battle is being fought in Brazil, where a local Facebook executive was incarcerated and then later released over the same general matter - the social media giant's refusal to share user's information on WhatsApp, the company's messaging app.
Police authorities in Brazil believe that the information coursed through the social media network could help in their investigation of drug trafficking.
Apple's and Facebook's situation seems to be similar at first glance since they booth involve encryption in the devices. The FBI wants to hack the iPhone of a suspected terrorists but can't because of the encryption, and the Brazilian police wants to hack the messages in WhatsApp but can't because of the app's encryption.
However, there's a crucial difference between the two. Apple admits that it can do what the FBI wants, but chooses not to. Facebook says it simply cannot do what the police wants because they have no way to get past over the app's encryption.
A report published in November 2014 can give a clue on why hacking messaging from WhatsApp may be impossible. At that time, the app received a security upgrade.
With this security upgrade, all android phone messages coursed through the app are now encrypted from the moment the message is typed all the way to its transmission process, through their own servers utilizing well respected, established, and open-source encryption techniques created by Open Whisper Systems.
OWS is a software company which is credited with the development of text-messaging and encrypted calling apps such as RedPhone, Flock, TextSecure and Signal.
