I&#x27;m a judge in Brazil. Even tough I&#x27;d pray to not be the one that had to give such an impopular order (affecting more then 100 million Brazilians - WhatsApp is really a hit here), we have laws in this country and we must prosecute criminals.<p>Mark&#x27;s talk about privacy is, in my opinion, totally misplaced. No right is absolute, and that includes the right to privacy. Criminals, for example, simply don&#x27;t have it. This is not me saying; this is our Constitution saying it (and the Constitution of every Western country that I know).<p>We are biased to see all measures against privacy with bad eyes, specially after Snowden. But that&#x27;s because you are good people and see the matter with those eyes, not with the eyes of a criminal. Do you guys think that pedophiles, terrorists and drug dealers have the right to privacy ? I don&#x27;t.<p>Also, what the NSA was (is?) doing is a complete absurd, with no judicial oversight, mass collecting everything they can get in secrecy. This has nothing to do with what we have here. In Brazil, only a judge can authorize someone to be wiretapped, it can only be done in criminal cases with jail time (no civil cases). Also, the judge must specify a single phone number or single e-mail account and the decision must be reviewed every 15 days, otherwise it expires. Also, there&#x27;s a national database of wiretaps that every judge must feed by the end of the month, specifying how many wiretaps there are currently running.<p>WhatsApp and Facebook are not, by any means, above the law. If they want to provide a communication service here, the law is clear that they must abide by judicial orders that allow wiretapping in very specific cases.