New Delhi: Meta-owned WhatsApp told the Delhi high court on Thursday (April 25) that it will effectively close operations in India and leave the country if forced to break end-to-end encryption.
“As a platform, we are saying, if we are told to break encryption, then WhatsApp goes,” the company’s lawyer Tejas Karia said.
The court was hearing WhatsApp’s 2021 petitions challenging a provision of the 2021 Information Technology Rules for social media intermediaries, requiring them to identify the first originator of information.
Appearing before a division bench of Acting Chief Justice Manmohan and Justice Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora, WhatsApp’s counsel said, “People use WhatsApp only because of its encryption. Now by implementing this rule, we will have to break the encryption. Otherwise, it won’t be possible to trace the originator. Billions and billions of messages may have to be stored for ‘n’ number of years, because there is no limit here.”
“There are two rights. One is privacy. At the same time, the government has a right to know… for instance, if a terrorist is sending a message, he has to be caught. We are caught in between. Whether I should break my platform for one of the instances or for billions of instances. Is it proportionate? That has to be considered. The court will have to examine the constitutional validity of this rule. There is nothing in the Information Technology Act which allows the government to make this rule,” the counsel continued.
Other messaging platforms too have previously stated their commitment to end-to-end encryption.
“We would shut down before we adulterate or undermine the privacy promises that encryption is the technological guarantee,” Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker said at a conference in June last year. “We do not have a reason to exist if not to provide a truly private mechanism for communications. That is where we stand.”
At the same conference, Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp at Meta, had said that end-to-end encryption “is under attack in jurisdictions around the world”.
WhatsApp is “engineered to be private from the ground up and Meta is committed to end-to-end encryption as an enabler of human rights”, he continued. “Defending E2EE is crucial for privacy, security, and freedom of speech and opinion.”
