FBI can gain 'limited' access to private WhatsApp and Apple iMessage conversations …

A new document from the Federal Bureau of Investigation has revealed the extent of the data they can collect from the most popular messaging apps like WhatsApp and iMessage.The document, which was written 7 January 2021 by the agency’s Science and Technology Branch and Operational Technology Division, is an internal guide to how the FBI can request data from nine companies and their services: Apple’s iMessage, Line, Signal, Telegram, Threema, Viber, Tencent’s WeChat, Meta’s WhatsApp and Wickr.The FBI can get “limited” access to iMessages and, with a search warrant, can “render backups of a target device” and, “if the target uses iCloud backup … can also acquire iMessages from iCloud” if the user has enabled it.Apple declined to comment on the record to The Independent, instead referring to its legal process guidelines.WhatsApp, meanwhile, can provide almost real-time data about a user’s messaging habits. This does not pass over the contents of the chats, but rather the metadata around it.“Return data provided by the companies listed below, with the exception of WhatsApp, are actually logs of latent data that are provided to law enforcement in a non-real-time manner and may impact investigations due to delivery delays”, the document says.Metadata is a…
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