Whatsapp is currently blocked in Brazil and will remain so till Thursday. This is in accordance with a court order which mandated that local telecommunication companies block the widely popular messaging app for 72-hours because the company failed to provide information requested in a drug trafficking investigation.
Any local cellphone carrier who doesn’t comply would face a fine of $142,000 per day. So far, I haven’t heard that any disobeyed.
The judge must be kidding though, because Whatspp can’t provide information it doesn’t have. I mean the company recently rolled out end-to-end encryption, meaning even they themselves can’t see what their users are sending back and forth. Or can they?
But kidding or not, Judge Marcel Maia Montalvao of Sergipe state passed the order and it’s been on since 2 pm local time yesterday.
This encryption debate isn’t going away any time soon. There’re just too many salient points from both parties. On the one side is the need to keep the private information and conversations of innocent citizens private but on the other hand is the fact that evil people with malicious intent can also keep all their plans (or at least most of it) hidden through the same means.
However though, I’ve read those in Brazil can still access Whatsapp while the ban is on by using the Orbot app from Tor project.
By the way, this isn’t the first time Whatsapp is being banned in Brazil. A similar ban was placed on the messaging service in December for 48 hours because of failure to cooperate in a separate criminal investigation.
UPDATE (04/04/16)
The ruling was overturned only one day into the ban. So right now Brazilians have access to the messaging service.
