Side Note

Your encrypted messages are encrypted from everyone except the feds

Their many faults aside, secure messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp are all supposed to be, well... secure. So long as you follow the basic instructions — and, you know, actually turn the security features on — it’s reasonable to expect some semblance of privacy. Unless, of course, you’re under investigation by the U.S. government. Then most bets are off.

In a letter to the judge presiding over the case against Donald Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York confirmed that it had obtained 731 pages of Cohen’s messages, including call log data, from secure messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp.

The somewhat concerning affair was presented with a hint of levity in a section of the memo entitled, “Contents of Encrypted Messaging Applications,” with the lead prosecutor on the case, Deputy U.S. Attorney Robert Khuzami, writing: “The Government was advised that the FBI’s original electronic extraction of data from telephones did not capture content related to encrypted messaging applications, such as WhatsApp and Signal. The FBI has now obtained this material.”

Though the FDNY’s filing didn’t explicitly state how the FBI got ahold of all of this data, it’s not that difficult to imagine. Earlier this month, the feds were able to obtain encrypted messages sent by Paul Manafort through WhatsApp and Telegram by slapping Apple with a subpoena to search his iCloud account. Authorities could have also decrypted the messages stored on Cohen’s Blackberry (lol) using one of the many tools currently available to display WhatsApp messages on a PC.