Meta Chief Executive Officer, Mark Zuckerberg has explained how US security agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency can access WhatsApp messages.
Mark made this known during his recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, where he analysed the intricacies of government surveillance and encryption bypassing methods.
The Meta CEO maintained that WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption prevents his company’s servers from seeing what is in a message.
He said: “Because it’s encrypted, they can’t hack META and get access to your messages. So someone like the NSA or CIA would have to do some kind of hacking into your phone. You know there are probably ways to do that, (through) Pegasus.
“And of course, it is always the ultimate physical part which is if they have access to your computer. You can usually just break in. That is why if the FBI arrests you, they take your phone and are probably going to be able to get in and see what is in there.
“This is why we put disappearing messages because that way if someone compromised your phone, they can’t see everything, obviously they can see stuff that comes in.
“The thing that encryption does that’s really good is it makes it so that the company that’s running the service doesn’t see it. So if you’re using WhatsApp, there’s no point at which the Meta servers see the contents of that message.”
“So having it be encrypted and disappearing, I think, is a pretty good kind of standard of security and privacy,” he added.