US authorities reportedly investigate claims that Meta can read encrypted WhatsApp messages

US authorities have reportedly investigated claims that Meta can read users’ encrypted chats on the WhatsApp messaging platform, which it owns. The reports follow a lawsuit filed last week, which claimed Meta “can access virtually all of WhatsApp users’ purportedly ‘private’ communications”. Meta has denied the allegation, reported by Bloomberg, calling the lawsuit’s claim “categorically false and absurd”. It suggested the claim was a tactic 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. The firm that filed last week’s lawsuit against Meta, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, attributes the allegation to unnamed “courageous” whistleblowers from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico and South Africa. Quinn Emanuel is, in a separate case, helping to represent the NSO Group in its appeal against a judgment from a US federal court last year, which ordered it to pay $167m to WhatsApp for violating its terms of service in its deployment of Pegasus spyware against more than 1,400 users. “We’re pursuing sanctions against Quinn Emanuel for filing a meritless lawsuit that was designed purely to grab headlines,” said Carl Woog, a Meta spokesperson, in a statement. “This is the
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