FBI Document Tells The Story OF Data Access Via Messengers

If you are looking for a messenger with which you can protect yourself as well as possible from government glances, you will find it in the training materials of the US Federal Police. The relevant document has now been made public via a freedom of information request.

In it, the authority explains a number of messenger platforms that information investigators can access if it remains within the legal framework. The good news: With virtually no platform, it is directly possible to intercept and read the content of the communication. In the meantime, encryption has become too widely accepted for that.

However, that does not mean that the authorities do not have the opportunity to access the content of the messages – at least on some of the platforms. This applies above all to the services of the large US providers, which inevitably have to obey the laws of the USA. So if FBI officials at Apple (iMessage) or Meta (WhatsApp) are at the door with a corresponding court order, they will, for example, get access to some content that has landed unencrypted on the provider’s servers.

It depends on the state

The situation is different with foreign platforms. An example of this is WeChat, which comes from China. Here at least the FBI receives little information – and only if, for example, you are looking for a user from the USA. For example, the operator Tencent will not publish any information about the Chinese. However, this only applies to inquiries from the FBI, if Chinese authorities want to know something, it will certainly look completely different.

According to the FBI documents, which as of January 2021 and therefore quite up-to-date, little information comes out, Telegram and Signal. The two messengers were designed to meet a high data protection standard right from the start. Here, at best, investigators get some inventory data and very limited metadata.