Khaberni - The US Department of Commerce has suddenly and secretly closed an investigation it was conducting into allegations regarding secure encryption standards in "WhatsApp," after reaching a conclusion that confirms Meta's access to encrypted messages on the platform, according to a report by the American agency Bloomberg.
The investigation, conducted by the Office of Industry and Security of the Department, lasted 10 months starting in 2025, according to statements from the agent who was responsible for the investigation and who refused to disclose his name to Bloomberg.
Before the sudden conclusion of the investigation, the responsible investigator communicated by email with over 12 separate US federal agencies according to Bloomberg's report, conveying to them the findings he reached in his investigation.
The investigator described Meta's and its executives' actions with WhatsApp's encrypted messages in one of his emails to the federal agencies as a clear and explicit violation of the users' civil and criminal rights, without referring to the laws that the company violated according to the agency's report.
He added, saying: "There are no restrictions on the WhatsApp messages that Meta can access," justifying this according to Bloomberg as the company stores, retains, and accesses all messages sent through its services, pointing out that some external collaborators with Meta are able to access these messages."
It is worth noting that WhatsApp asserts that its messages are completely encrypted between the two parties involved, which means that no one should have access to the messages except the two parties who own the encryption keys.
Bloomberg's report notes that the investigation's halt was extremely sudden and unexpected, which raises central questions about its fate and the intentions of the US government.
For its part, Meta has completely denied these allegations since their emergence, and its official stance continued to deny even after Bloomberg's report appeared, describing it as outright lies.
The official spokesperson Andy Stone added, saying: "Months ago, the Office of Industry and Security distanced itself from this alleged investigation, describing its employee's allegations as baseless, and confirming that the agency is not investigating WhatsApp or Meta regarding violations of export laws."
Why did the investigation start in the first place?
According to Bloomberg, the investigation into the encryption mechanism used in "WhatsApp" began following a complaint from an unidentified whistleblower to the Securities and Exchange Commission alongside another case against "Meta" for the same matter, coinciding with a case between "Meta" and the Israeli spyware firm "NSO," developer of the "Pegasus" software that breaches "WhatsApp."
At the time, Meta completely denied the accusations and clarified that it is one of the mechanisms that "NSO" used to support its case and assert that the company does not care greatly about protecting users' data and messages, according to a report published by the British newspaper "The Guardian" at that time.
However, the law firm that filed the case against "Meta" due to WhatsApp's encryption confirmed that their clients come from several countries around the world including Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa.
From his side, Professor of Security Engineering at the University of London, Stephen Murdoch, finds the lawsuit against "Meta" strange and based primarily on anonymous leaks, but if Meta actually reads "WhatsApp" messages, then such a thing would have come to the public years ago and would have completely destroyed the company, from his perspective.
Previously, Elon Musk, CEO of "X", and Pavel Durov, CEO of the encrypted chat platform "Telegram", had criticized the encryption mechanisms in "WhatsApp," according to a report from the American tech site "Cyber News."
What does this mean for us?
If "Meta" is truly capable of reading all WhatsApp messages and accessing them in various forms, this means a significant global privacy breach unprecedented in scale, since the platform currently has over two billion users worldwide, and such a matter would put Meta in an awkward economic, political, and technical position because it would need to defend all of its services that will be implicated.
This situation—if true—would also hinder the company's efforts to develop artificial intelligence models and integrate them with its platforms, efforts that are met with broad skepticism and concerns regarding privacy and access to user data and training AI models on them.
It is worth noting that Meta was part of a scandal that shook the world years ago related to the US elections in 2018, a scandal globally known as the "Cambridge Analytica scandal," referring to the company that helped "Facebook" at that time in analyzing users' data.
