WhatsApp, Used by 100

Million Brazilians, Was Shut

Down Nationwide by a Single
Judge
Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Fishman
May 2 2016, 11:24 a.m.

Illustration: The Intercept

(Para ler a verso desse artigo em Portugus, clique aqui.)

(update below)
A BRAZ ILIA N STAT E J UD GEordered mobile phone operators to
block nationwide the extremely popular WhatsApp chat
servicefor 72 hours, a move that will have widespread
international reverberations for the increasingly
contentiousdebate over encryption and online privacy. The ruling,
issued on April 26, became public on Mondaywhen it wasserved
on mobile service providers. It took effect the same day at 2 p.m.
local time (1 p.m. ET); as of that time, people in Brazil who tried to
use the service could not connect, nor could they send or receive
any messages. Failure to comply will subject the service providers
to a fine of 500,000 reals per day ($142,000 per day).
WhatsApp is the most-usedapp in Brazil, a country of 200 million
people (it is now owned by Facebook, the countrys second-most
used app). An estimated 91 percent of Brazilian mobile users
nationwide more than 100 million individuals use WhatsApp
to communicate with one another for free (it has 900 million
active daily users around the world). Brazilians spent this morning,
in the hours before the block took effect, franticallysending each
other messages on WhatsApp warning that the service was going
down for three days.
This ruling comes from the same judge, Marcel Maia Montalvo, of
a small town in Sergipe state, who two months ago ordered
Facebooks vice president for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, to be
detainedover WhatsApps failure to cooperate with a subpoena
issued as part of a criminal investigation. The judge said the arrest

was justified by Facebooks repeatedly failing to comply with

judicial orders in a drug-trafficking case.Pursuant to that order,
Dzodan was arrested by federal police and held in custody for a
full day, until an appellate court overturned the order.
Afterward, the Facebook executive insisted that the way that
information is encrypted from one cellphone to another, there is
no information stored that could be handed over to authorities.
WhatsApp similarly said: WhatsApp cannot provide information
we do not have.According to Folha de So Paulo,Brazils
largestnewspaper, Mondaysruling ordering the shutdown of
WhatsApp stems from the same case.
The extraordinary orders reflect what is becoming a global
controversy over the fight of technology companies to offer their
users end-to-end encryption. That service, which has become
quite in demand in the wake of reporting from the archive
provided by Edward Snowden, ensures that only the users but
not the company itself can access the content they are sharing.
The post-Snowden fixation of tech companies to demonstrate a
genuine commitment to protect the privacy of their users
(motivated by business self-interest) has driven a wedge between
the once-fully collaborative Silicon Valley and U.S. government
surveillance state partners, creating a protracted and bitter public
PR war that culminated last month in the Apple/FBI fight over
access to iPhones.
As a result of itsencryption protections, the position of
WhatsAppin response to subpoenas has been that itis incapable
of turning over users communications because theencryption not
only keeps governments and non-state actors out but also the

company itself.Over the past several years,numerous

countrieshave begun enacting laws to bar companies from using
any encryption thatthey cannot circumvent, and the Obama
administrationhas been debating whether to support legislation
that would allow only the use of encryption to which government
agencieshave backdoor access (in the 1990s, the Clinton
administration used the Oklahoma City bombing to argue for a
similar law, but it was blocked by a coalition of privacy advocates
from both parties in Congress).

T HI S IS NOTthe first time WhatsApp service has been

interrupted in Brazil. Last December, in a separate case, a lower
court judge in So Paulo state ordered service providers to block
the app for 48 hours as retribution for its failure to cooperate in a
criminal investigation. An appeals court overturned the ruling but
only after hours of service outage, invoking constitutional
principles to say that it does not seem reasonable that millions
of users are affected because of the inertia of acompany.
In many ways, Brazil with huge numbers of internet users and a
growing online population of young people is a key
battleground for the global struggleforinternet freedom. The Wall
Street Journalcalled Brazil the social media capital of the
universe. In January, after the last WhatsApp shutdown, two
analysts from the Brazil-based Igarap Institute, Robert Muggah
and Nathan Thompson,wrote in theNew York Times, The country
has one of the fastest growing populations of internet users in the
world. Online tools like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp are used
not only to express opinions; they are an affordable alternative to

exorbitantly priced Brazilian telecom providers.

GLENN
InGaRcountry
_
E E N W Awith
L D turbulent political conflicts and a highly

engaged online population, the debateover internet freedom has

become very prominent. Along with Germany, the Brazilian
government, in the wake of the Snowden revelations, was the
most vocal in denouncing the U.S. for excessive NSA
surveillance(Brazil was a key target for such spying). In 2014, the
government enacted what it claimed wasa law to protect internet
freedom, Marco Civil da Internet, that did provide some privacy
protections but also granted
new surveillance powers to the

68

government. Just last month, the government demanded, and

received, a new draconian anti-terrorism law that provided it with
extreme new law enforcement powers (causing ex-President Lula
da Silva to break with his party, which controls the government,
by telling The Interceptin an interview that he opposes the new
law).
And now, as The Intercept reported last week, a new cybercrime bill
on the verge of being enacted could codify internet-shutdown
powers of the type the state judgeimposed on Monday.In a
Facebook post, Ronaldo Lemos, founding director of the Institute
of Technology and Society of Rio de Janeiro and an architect of
Brazils landmark 2014 Marco Civil internet legislation, wrote:
Tomorrow, the Cybercrime CPI will vote on a proposal to make
this type of block lawful. If the CPI proposal goes forward, this will
be the new normal in the country. Every week we would have
news of sites and services that are blocked, as it is in Saudi Arabia
and North Korea.
It is stunning to watch a single judge instantlyshut down a

primary means of online communication for the worlds fifthlargest country. The two security experts in the NYTwroteof the
first WhatsApp shutdown:The judges action was reckless and
represents a potentially longer-term threat to the freedoms of
Brazilians. But there is no question that is just a sign of what is to
come for countries far fromBrazil: There will undoubtedly be
similar battles in numerous countries around the world over what
rights companies have to offer privacy protections to their users.

U PDAT E: WhatsApp is functioning again in Brazil. Hours after an

emergency appeal was rejected early Tuesday morning, an
appellate court upheld WhatsApps appeal and overturned the
original order at around 2:15 p.m. local time (1:15 p.m. ET).

CONTACT THE AUTHOR:

Glenn Greenwald

glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com
t @ggreenwald
Andrew Fishman

fishman@theintercept.com
t @AndrewDFish

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INSIDE THE
ASSASSINATION
COMPLEX
Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking Its an Act of
Political Resistance
f

196

Illustration: The Intercept

Edward Snowden
May 3 2016, 3:00 a.m.

VE B EE N WAIT I N G40
years for someone like
you. Those were the
first words Daniel
Ellsberg spoke to me
when we met last year.
Dan and I felt an
immediate kinship; we
both knew what it
meant to risk so much

and to be irrevocably changed by revealing secret truths.

One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the
knowledge that people continue to sit, just as you did, at those
desks, in that unit, throughout the agency, who see what you saw
and comply in silence, without resistance or complaint. They learn
to live not just with untruths but with unnecessary untruths,
dangerous untruths, corrosive untruths. It is a double tragedy:
What begins as a survival strategy ends with the compromise of
the human being it sought to preserve and the diminishing of the
democracy meant to justify the sacrifice.
But unlike Dan Ellsberg, I didnt have to wait 40years to witness
other citizens breaking that silence with documents. Ellsberg gave
the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers in
1971; Chelsea Manning provided the Iraq and Afghan War logs and
the Cablegate materials to WikiLeaks in 2010. I came forward in

2013. Now here we are in 2016, and another person of courage and
conscience has made available the set of extraordinary documents
that are published in The Assassination Complex, the new book out
today by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept.(The
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UNOFFICIAL
_SOURCES

NSA and CIA Double Their

Warrantless Searches on
Americans in Two Years
Jenna McLaughlin
May 3 2016, 11:16 a.m.

10

Photo: John W. Adkisson/Getty Images

FR OM 2013 TO 20 15, the NSA and CIA doubled the number of

warrantless searches they conducted for Americans data in a
massive NSA database ostensibly collected for foreign intelligence
purposes, according to a new intelligence community transparency
report.
The estimated number of search terms concerning a known U.S.
person to get contents of communications within what is known
as the 702 database was 4,672 more than double the 2013 figure.
And that doesnt even include the number of FBI searches on that
database. A recently released Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court rulingconfirmed that the FBI is allowed to run any number
of searches it wants on that database, not only for national
security probes but also to hunt for evidence of traditional crimes.
No estimates have ever been released of how often that happens.
Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the
NSA collects hundreds of millions of digital communications at
rest and in transit from the major internet backbones running in
and out of the U.S., as well as from Google, Facebook, YouTube,
and other companies, involving targets overseas.
Americans communications are constitutionally protected from

warrantless searches, but when those communications are swept

up by the NSA incidentally to its maingoal, those protections
have been essentially ignored.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has said the
practice of searching the database for American communications
is not unlawful because the content is collected legitimately in
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