Ed Ludlow

What we know is there's this law enforcement investigation and there's also an SEC whistleblower complaint.

So some people...

with knowledge of this, or knowledge of these claims, brought them to the SEC, and that's essentially telling the SEC, we see something wrong here, we think you should investigate.

We know the law enforcement agent who worked for the Department of Commerce also obtained some of that material from the whistleblower complaint, but we don't know exactly what the relationship between those two things is.

The investigator's report was dated July 2025.

It's been as active as recently as January, as your reporting says.

Why has Meta been able thus far to say we can't see WhatsApp messages?

What is the technology behind it that makes it encrypted?

Yes.

So Meta describes its WhatsApp chats as protected by the signal protocol, which is a sort of encryption that is supposed to be on both ends to ensure that communications can't be intercepted in transit.

They can exist on your phone and on the phone of someone you're communicating with.

But the keys to sort of open that up and to decrypt them only live on those devices.

And what Meta says is, we can't see anything in between because we don't have the keys.

Bloomberg's Jake Blyberg.

This is a story on the Bloomberg terminal and on Bloomberg.com that you really want to read.

The U.S.

has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private.

Terrific reporting.

That does it, Carrie, for this edition of Bloomberg Tech.

It's been a week where we've had earnings, Fed news, a lot of breaking news from the Bloomberg team.