(Credit: PCMag/Michael Kan)
Meta is firing back at a January lawsuit that alleged WhatsApp never supported end-to-end encryption, arguing the plaintiff’s claims are unraveling.
In a Monday court filing, Meta says it has spent months "proactively engaged" with the plaintiffs on why the allegations are baseless. The lawsuit comes from a group of users based in countries such as Australia, Mexico, and South Africa, who cite “courageous whistleblowers” who allege Meta has “unlimited access” to WhatsApp’s encrypted messages.
With end-to-end encryption, Meta itself can’t view any user messages. So, if true, the sensational claims would undermine a core privacy feature of WhatsApp. The problem is that the lawsuit never offered any technical details to back up its allegations; instead, it merely claimed Meta had an internal system to easily view users' WhatsApp messages.
When the lawsuit was first filed, Meta was quick to dismiss the allegations as “categorically false and absurd.” In the Monday filing, the company revealed it’s been pushing the plaintiffs and their lawyers to withdraw the case, arguing the “so-called ‘whistleblowers’ behind the complaint are confused, deeply misinformed, or acting in bad faith.”
Meta went so far as to offer “sworn declarations from two WhatsApp employees,” confirming under penalty of perjury that WhatsApp is built on the open-source Signal protocol to ensure end-to-end encryption. One of the declarations comes from Maaz Ali, a software engineer who’s been at WhatsApp since 2018.
“Furthermore, the testimony affirms that ‘WhatsApp did not introduce any cryptographic or kleptographic ‘backdoor’ that would enable WhatsApp to view users’ end-to-end encrypted communications,’” Meta’s court filing says.
(Credit: Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)The company adds that it pressed the plaintiffs to substantiate their claims, including by requesting the identities of the whistleblowers and any documentary evidence. But Meta never received any such details. “Plaintiffs’ response to WhatsApp’s outreach confirms that they are maintaining a complaint they do not believe in,” the company argues.
The court document also suggests the lawsuit is based on confusion about WhatsApp’s system to tackle abuse through voluntary user reporting. Meta cites a letter from one of the plaintiff’s lawyers that notes: “For example, for lay whistleblowers or others not trained in cryptography, it would not be obvious what the difference is between somehow breaking an encryption protocol versus obtaining the messages at the endpoints of an encrypted exchange; i.e., before or after they were encrypted."
Meta is using that statement as evidence that “their own ‘whistleblowers’ could have simply been confused about what they were seeing.” It’s long been known that WhatsApp’s support team can view a subset of user messages, but importantly, these messages have been manually reported for abuse and thus forwarded to Meta.
To push the plaintiffs to drop the lawsuit, Meta says it offered to let them review WhatsApp’s source code, but the company was rebuffed. A letter from the plaintiff’s lawyers notes that it demanded access to view "the entirety of the WhatsApp application source code," including portions that do not “bear on WhatsApp’s encryption architecture.”
Meta says it now has “no choice” but to file a motion asking the judge to not only dismiss the lawsuit but also impose sanctions against the lawyers and plaintiffs for pursuing the case. This would amount to “awarding WhatsApp the full amount of reasonable attorneys’ fees and expenses it has incurred in defending this action,” the filing says.
“Having made spurious accusations, Plaintiffs should not be permitted to go back to the drawing board and dream up new theories to prop up their lawsuit,” the company added.
However, Adam Wolfson, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, told PCMag: "Suffice to say we disagree with Meta’s motion. Note it only talks about 'encrypted' messages. For months, we have pointed out that messages are unencrypted on either side of a WhatsApp conversation and that they have never provided proof they lack access to those messages. If they had a simple answer to that question, you would think they would have addressed it in their motion. They did not."
In the meantime, Bloomberg reported last week that a US agency abruptly closed its own investigation into allegations that Meta can access encrypted WhatsApp messages. “There is no limit to the type of WhatsApp message that can be viewed by Meta,” an agent with the Commerce Department originally wrote, according to Bloomberg.