<\/p>\n
US authorities have reportedly investigated claims that Meta can read users\u2019 encrypted chats on the WhatsApp<\/a> messaging platform, which it owns.<\/p>\n The reports follow a lawsuit filed last week, which claimed Meta<\/a> \u201ccan access virtually all of WhatsApp users\u2019 purportedly \u2018private\u2019 communications\u201d.<\/p>\n Meta has denied the allegation, reported by Bloomberg<\/a>, calling the lawsuit\u2019s claim \u201ccategorically false and absurd\u201d. It suggested the claim was a tactic<\/a> to support the NSO Group, an Israeli firm that develops spyware used against activists and journalists, and which recently lost a lawsuit brought by WhatsApp.<\/p>\n The firm that filed last week\u2019s lawsuit against Meta, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, attributes the allegation to unnamed<\/a> \u201ccourageous\u201d whistleblowers from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa.<\/p>\n Quinn Emanuel is, in a separate case, helping to represent the NSO Group in its appeal against a judgment<\/a> from a US federal court last year, which ordered it to pay $167m to WhatsApp for violating its terms of service in its deployment<\/a> of Pegasus spyware against more than 1,400 users.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re pursuing sanctions against Quinn Emanuel for filing a meritless lawsuit that was designed purely to grab headlines,\u201d said Carl Woog, a Meta spokesperson, in a statement. \u201cThis is the same firm that is trying to help NSO overturn an injunction that barred their operations for targeting journalists and government officials with spyware.\u201d<\/p>\n Adam Wolfson, a partner at Quinn Emanuel said: \u201cOur colleagues\u2019 defence of NSO on appeal has nothing to do with the facts disclosed to us and which form the basis of the lawsuit we brought for worldwide WhatsApp users.<\/p>\n \u201cWe look forward to moving forward with those claims and note WhatsApp\u2019s denials have all been carefully worded in a way that stops short of denying the central allegation in the complaint \u2013 that Meta has the ability to read WhatsApp messages, regardless of its claims about end-to-end encryption.\u201d<\/p>\n Steven Murdoch, professor of security engineering at UCL, said the lawsuit was \u201ca bit strange\u201d. \u201cIt seems to be going mostly on whistleblowers, and we don\u2019t know much about them or their credibility,\u201d he said. \u201cI would be very surprised if what they are claiming is actually true.\u201d<\/p>\n If WhatsApp were, indeed, reading users\u2019 messages, this was likely to have been discovered by staff and would end the business, he said. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to keep secrets inside a company. If there was something as scandalous as this going on, I think it\u2019s very likely that it would have leaked out from someone within WhatsApp.\u201d<\/p>\n The Bloomberg article cites reports and interviews from officials within the US Department of Commerce in claiming that the US has investigated whether Meta could read WhatsApp messages. However, a spokesperson for the department called these assertions \u201cunsubstantiated\u201d.<\/p>\n