US reportedly investigate claims that Meta can read encrypted WhatsApp messages

Summary

US authorities have reportedly investigated claims that Meta can read users’ encrypted chats on the WhatsApp messaging platform, which it owns.The reports follow a lawsuit filed last week, which claimed Meta “can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications”.Meta has denied the allegation, reported by Bloomberg, calling the lawsuit’s claim “categorically false and absurd”. It suggested the claim was a tactic to support the NSO Group, an Israeli firm that develops spyware used against activists and journalists, and which recently lost a lawsuit brought by WhatsApp.The firm that filed last week’s lawsuit against Meta, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, attributes the allegation to unnamed “courageous” whistleblowers from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa.Quinn Emanuel is, in a separate case, helping to represent the NSO Group in its appeal against a judgment from a US federal court last year, which ordered it to pay $167m to WhatsApp for violating its terms of service in its deployment of Pegasus spyware against more than 1,400 users.“We’re pursuing sanctions against Quinn Emanuel for filing a meritless lawsuit that was designed purely to grab headlines,” said Carl Woog, a Meta spokesperson, in a statement. “This is the same firm that is trying to help NSO overturn an injunction that barred their operations for targeting journalists and government officials with spyware.”Adam Wolfson, a partner at Quinn Emanuel said: “Our colleagues’ defence of NSO on appeal has nothing to do with the facts disclosed to us and which form the basis of the lawsuit we brought for worldwide WhatsApp users.“We look forward to moving forward with those claims and note WhatsApp’s denials have all been carefully worded in a way that stops short of denying the central allegation in the complaint – that Meta has the ability to read WhatsApp messages, regardless of its claims about end-to-end encryption.”Steven Murdoch, professor of security engine...