&gt; Obeying duly authorized warrants or subpoenas is very reasonable.<p>Depends on the warrant or subpoena and the technology in question.  If they have plaintext messages sitting around on a server somewhere, then perhaps they can supply the messages they&#x27;ve irresponsibly given themselves access to.  However, WhatsApp claims to provide end-to-end encryption in some (though not all) cases, so they may not <i>have</i> the data in question; if so, a subpoena expecting them to supply it anyway wouldn&#x27;t be reasonable.  A subpoena expecting them to backdoor their client (in general or for a specific user) would not be reasonable.<p>And that&#x27;s before getting into the &quot;why&quot; of the individual case, such as whether this has any more merit than the &quot;take down this YouTube video because it embarrasses us&quot; cases that caused Brazil to attempt to block YouTube previously.<p>Apart from that, a subpoena from a country only has legal meaning to a business with a legal nexus in that country.  Providing a service via the Internet does not create a legal nexus in every country in the world.<p>&gt; If WhatsApp doesn&#x27;t like that, they should withdraw their business from Brazil.<p>What business in Brazil?  I haven&#x27;t seen anything in the stories or comments thus far to suggest that they have any legal nexus in Brazil.  They have <i>customers</i> all over the world.