#84: WhatsApp with Brazil?

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2016

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

WhatsApp has over a billion users worldwide, and the Facebook-owned encrypted messaging app is particularly popular in Brazil, where it’s used by 93% of Internet users. Earlier this month, a Brazilian court shut down the app across the country after the company failed to comply with a court order demanding data related to a drug trafficking investigation. Evan is joined by Javier Pallero, policy analyst in Latin America for Access Now, and his American counterpart, Amie Stepanovich. They discuss WhatsApp’s woes in Brazil and what the shutdowns mean for the broader global debate over encryption.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the tech policy podcast. I'm Evan Schwarzenzscharber, your host. On today's show, WhatsApp gets shut down in Brazil again. The messaging app that's used by over a billion people has been shut down after failure to comply with a court order where the company was requested to hand over information involving a drug trafficking investigation and organized crime.
0:31.0	Joining me to discuss this is Javier Pallero, policy analyst at Access Now, and he is the head of the policy team at the organization's
0:39.7	Latin American activities. Javier, thank you for joining me. Thank you, Evan, for having me.
0:45.4	And also joining me is friend of the show, Amy Stepanovich, who is the U.S. policy manager,
0:50.8	excuse me, at Access Now. Amy, thank you for joining the show again.
0:53.7	Thanks for having me back, Evan.
0:55.6	So WhatsApp, as I mentioned, is used by over a billion people, and it's particularly
0:59.4	popular in Brazil, where over 100 million Brazilians use it.
1:03.7	About 93% of Internet users use the service.
1:07.8	So, Javier, what's going on with with WhatsApp and why are they having so many problems with
1:12.1	Brazilian courts? Well, the answer to those questions is really complicated, but just for
1:19.2	start, we can say that judges want to apply local laws to an international internet service,
1:25.5	which is something that is similar to what happens in other countries. And on the other side, WhatsApp in the past and Facebook in the past, they
1:33.3	have been a little bit reluctant to comply with some orders. So now this case, it's just
1:41.0	escalated the conflict and put everyone in a really strange position where the
1:46.3	service got blocked as a way of compelling the company to provide information in a criminal
1:51.8	case. And we've mentioned on the show before that WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted. And what this
1:58.4	means is that only the sender and receiver of a message can see it.
2:03.6	So when the court went to WhatsApp and said, hand over the information, what happened?
2:10.7	Well, the thing is that in this case is where WhatsApp is saying that since the messages are
2:17.4	encrypted, they are not able to
2:19.0	comply because the judge wants to know the content of the conversations that he is trying to
	...

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