WhatsApp cannot provide information it does not have
Jan Koum, WhatsApp's founder, who was born in Ukraine, has talked about his family members' fears that the government was eavesdropping on their phone calls. In the company's early years, WhatsApp had the ability to read messages as they passed through its servers. That meant it could comply with government wiretap orders.
But in late 2014, the company said that it would begin adding sophisticated encoding, known as end-to-end encryption, to its systems. Only the intended recipients would be able to read the messages.
"WhatsApp cannot provide information we do not have," the company said this month when Brazilian police arrested a Facebook executive after the company failed to turn over information about a customer who was the subject of a drug trafficking investigation.
For more than a half-century, the Justice Department has relied on wiretaps as a fundamental crime-fighting tool. To some in law enforcement, if companies like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram can design unbreakable encryption, then the future of wiretapping is in doubt.
"You're getting useless data," said Joseph DeMarco, a former federal prosecutor who now represents law enforcement agencies that filed briefs supporting the Justice Department in its fight with Apple. "The only way to make this not gibberish is if the company helps."