Facebook-owned WhatsApp is banned in Brazil again. A Brazilian judge has ruled that WhatsApp be blocked indefinitely, Reuters reports. The judge, Daniela Barbosa Assunção de Souza, ordered the country's wireless carriers to block the messaging app for allegedly not cooperating with a criminal investigation. "We're working to get WhatsApp back online in Brazil," WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum said in a Facebook post. "It's shocking that less than two months after Brazilian people and lawmakers loudly rejected blocks of services like WhatsApp, history is repeating itself. As before, millions of people are cut off from friends, loved ones, customers, and colleagues today, simply because we are being asked for information we don't have."
In December, a judge ordered WhatsApp blocked for 48 hours for failing to respond to a court order. At the time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was a "sad day for Brazil," while Koum called the decision "short-sighted." Service returned, but in May, Judge Marcel Montalvao ordered it blocked for 72 hours when WhatsApp did not turn over records related to a drug investigation. That ban, however, lasted only one day. In May, Koum said WhatsApp simply does not have access to the data Brazilian authorities want. "Not only do we encrypt messages end-to-end on WhatsApp to keep people's information safe and secure, we also don't keep your chat history on our servers. When you send an end-to-end encrypted message, no one else can read it – not even us," he wrote.
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