Co-founder and CEO of Whatsapp Jan Koum slammed a Brazilian judge who blocked the app in the country for the second time in just six months. Koum said that he would not back down on keeping messages on the network encrypted as service of the app was restored on Tuesday.
The popular messaging app, WhatsApp, was made inaccessible to nearly 100 million users in Brazil after cellular providers blocked its access. A Brazilian state judge ordered service providers to comply or face a fine of 500,000 Brazilian reals ($143,000) daily.
The order on WhatsApp was to be held for 72 hours due to an ongoing drug-trafficking case in state court. The judge ordered the WhatsApp service to be shut down due to the company's refusal to cooperate in a criminal investigation, according to WSJ.
Koum explains that millions of innocent people from Brazil are being punished due to a court that is forcing WhatsApp to turn over information they simply do not have. Sending encrypted messages means that no one else can read them, not even people from WhatsApp.
The ruling came from Judge Marcel Maia Montalvão who also ordered the arrest of a Facebook executive who was overseeing operations in Latin American for the same case in March. The ban is just one in a series of clashes between WhatsApp and the Brazilian government. In December 2015, an appeal court quickly overturned the ruling of a 48-hour blockade of WhatApp in Brazil.
The WhatsApp app is installed on 91 percent of all Android devices in Brazil where users spend an average of one hour per day on the app, according to Similar Web, a market research firm. Blocking WhatsApp will have a major impact on the lives of Brazil's citizens since it is the most-used app in the country of 200 million people, according to Forbes.
On Tuesday, a different Brazilian judge overturned the ban on WhatsApp about 24 hours after Montalvão blocked it. Koum said in a statement that the company has no intention of compromising people's security as they hope their voices will be in heard in support of an open and secure Internet.
