Brazil releases detained Facebook executive

Facebook's Latin America VP Diego Dzodan, who had been detained on Tuesday over WhatsApp's inability to intercept instant messages related to a drug trafficking and organized crime case, has been freed by Brazilian authorities.

The executive had been detained on Tuesday night as he was not able to help the police break into the suspect's WhatsApp account (See: Brazil detains Facebook executive over data dispute ).

Meanwhile authorities are proceeding with the investigation into the case.

According to a WhatsApp spokesman, Dzodan was detained on the order of a Brazilian judge. But, the order was overturned by a higher court, which ruled in favour of the Facebook Inc executive, allowing him to be freed while the investigation was underway.

According to the judge Dzodan was not part of a criminal investigation, and hence could not be arrested. The authorities had been careful to say that it was a detention, but the Facebook executive still had to spend a night in jail nonetheless.

Meanwhile, according to The Washington Post, a WhatsApp spokesman revealed that the platform simply did not support wiretaps. Also in view of the fact that WhatsApp did not have offices in Brazil, it had no servers to store messages on, while end-to-end encryption only ensured that messages were encrypted when transmitted. Intercepting these messages would be useless, since WhatsApp did not have the key to unlock these messages.

WhatsApp spokesman Matt Steinfeld said, ''WhatsApp cannot provide information we do not have,'' he said.

Facebook said in a statement that it is ''disappointed with the extreme and disproportionate measure of having a Facebook executive escorted to a police station in connection with a case involving WhatsApp, which operates separately from Facebook.''