WhatsApp, the world's most popular instant-message app with more than 1
billion users, is now fully encrypted on all platforms:
Android,
iPhone,
Blackberry and others.
That's good news for users who care about
security and privacy, including journalists and dissidents. At the same
time, it represents the intensification of a trend toward ubiquitous
encryption that has posed challenges for law enforcement in the United
States and around the world.
"The idea is simple: when you send a
message, the only person who can read it is the person or group chat
that you send that message to. No one can see inside that message. Not
cybercriminals. Not hackers. Not oppressive regimes. Not even us,"
WhatsApp co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton wrote in a
blog post
Tuesday.
Such encryption, in which only the sender and receiver
can decrypt messages, makes it virtually impossible for foreign
governments and U.S. agencies to intercept instant messages and voice
calls, even with a warrant.
WhatsApp, which is
owned by Facebook,
has frustrated federal investigators in criminal investigations, but the
Justice Department has not taken the matter to court publicly in the
way it did recently with
Apple.
The Apple case involved data
stored on an iPhone used by one of the terrorists in San Bernardino,
California. By contrast, WhatsApp provides chat, group chat and voice
call services to users - or "data in motion."
WhatsApp and
Facebook are "great American companies," FBI General Counsel James A.
Baker said Tuesday in a moderated discussion at a conference of the
International Association of Privacy Professionals. But "this presents
us with a significant problem."
If the trend continues, he said,
"encryption like that will continue to roll out in a variety of
different ways across the technological landscape." Some of it is good,
he said, noting that his own data has been stolen by hackers a number of
times and he wished that the data had been encrypted. "But the key
thing is, that it has costs."
His boss, FBI Director James B.
Comey, has often said that the Islamic State is using encrypted apps to
direct people to kill "innocent people" in the United States. And it is
hindering investigations of murder, child pornography, organized crime
and a range of other crimes, law enforcement officials said.
Still,
Comey said at a congressional hearing last month: "It is not our job to
tell the American people how to resolve that problem. . . . Our job is
simply to tell people there is a problem."
But for WhatsApp and
Open Whisper Systems, a group of software developers that has helped the
company integrate the "end-to-end" encryption into its platform, the
issues are security and privacy. "What we're doing is trying to make
private communications simple," not thwart criminal investigations, said
Moxie Marlinspike, founder of Open Whisper Systems.
Criminals and
terrorists will use encryption regardless of what commercial firms do,
he said. Some al-Qaida-linked groups have released their own encryption
platforms.
Koum and Acton said in their blog post: "While we
recognize the important work of law enforcement in keeping people safe,
efforts to weaken encryption risk exposing people's information to abuse
from cybercriminals, hackers, and rogue states."
Koum, who is
WhatsApp chief executive, said he has a personal stake in privacy. "I
grew up in the USSR during communist rule and the fact that people
couldn't speak freely is one of the reasons my family moved to the
United States."
Open Whisper Systems developed the encryption
protocol for WhatsApp - the same protocol used for an Open Whisper
messaging app called Signal, which has millions of users. Over the next
year, Open Whisper Systems will continue to work with additional
messaging platforms to incorporate strong encryption, the group said.
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