WASHINGTON • While the United States Justice Department wages a public fight with Apple over access to a locked iPhone, government officials are privately debating how to resolve a prolonged stand-off with another technology company, WhatsApp, over access to its popular instant messaging application, officials and others involved in the case said.
No decision has been made, but a court fight with WhatsApp, the world's largest mobile messaging service, would open a new front in the Obama administration's dispute with Silicon Valley over encryption, security and privacy.
WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, allows customers to send messages and make phone calls over the Internet. In the last year, the company has been adding encryption to those conversations, making it impossible for the Justice Department to read or eavesdrop, even with a judge's wiretap order.
As recently as this past week, officials said, the Justice Department was discussing how to proceed in a continuing criminal investigation in which a federal judge had approved a wiretap, but investigators were stymied by WhatsApp's encryption.
The Justice Department and WhatsApp declined to comment. The government officials and others who discussed the dispute did so on condition of anonymity because the wiretap order and all the information associated with it were under seal.
The nature of the case was not clear, except that officials said it was not a terrorism investigation. The location of the investigation was also unclear.
To understand the battle lines, consider this imperfect analogy from the pre-digital world: If the Apple dispute is akin to whether the FBI can unlock your front door and search your house, the issue with WhatsApp is whether it can listen to your phone calls.
In the era of encryption, neither question has a clear answer. Some investigators view the WhatsApp issue as even more significant than the one over locked phones because it goes to the heart of the future of wiretapping. They say the Justice Department should ask a judge to force WhatsApp to help the government get information that has been encrypted. Others are reluctant to escalate the dispute, particularly with senators saying they will soon introduce legislation to help the government get data in a format it can read.
Whether the WhatsApp dispute ends in a court fight that sets precedents, many law enforcement officials and security experts say that such a case may be inevitable because the nation's wiretapping laws were last updated a generation ago, when people communicated by land-line telephones that were easy to tap.
"The FBI and the Justice Department are just choosing the exact circumstance to pick the fight that looks the best for them," said Mr Peter Eckersley, the chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit group that focuses on digital rights. "They're waiting for the case that makes the demand look reasonable."
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.
NEW YORK TIMES
