Encrypted WhatsApp messages frustrate new court-ordered wiretap
Found on Ars Technica on Sunday, 13 March 2016
According to a Saturday report in The New York Times, prosecutors have gone head-to-head with WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Facebook. Citing anonymous sources, the Times reported that "as recently as this past week," federal officials have been "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."
As Ars reported earlier this month, since late 2014, all WhatsApp messages sent between Android devices are end-to-end encrypted, which means that not even parent company Facebook can access their plaintext contents.
When police et al complain about encryption, it makes you wonder how they dealt with being unable to listen to a conversation back in the days where modern communication did not exist and people just talked to each other, face to face.