There is another, even more direct route that works regardless of backup settings: WhatsApp already includes a backdoor that allows it to decrypt all messages a

There is another, even more direct route that works regardless of backup settings: WhatsApp already includes a backdoor that allows it to decrypt all messages and send them to Facebook servers, conditioned on a single UI authorization from the user, specifically scanning a QR code on https://web.whatsapp.com/ https://web.whatsapp.com/ Once the terminal is authorized, the backdoor channel is opened in perpetuity and there is no more interaction with the user, it could happen at any time on your phone and you have no way of knowing short of complex reverse engineering of the app or network stream. And there is absolutely nothing stopping Facebook from inserting code into WhatsApp to skip the UI prompt when initially setting up the back channel, it would be a few lines of code. With Google or Apple's collaboration, a suspect's terminal could be surreptitiously updated to a vulnerable version that could open the channel, then updated again to the stock version, all in a matter of minutes, allowing law enforcement perpetual access to the stream of decrypted data. It's likely NSA has sufficient private key material to orchestrate something like this without any collaboration. The (not) news here is that any end-to-end encryption scheme is just a way to thwart packet sniffing hackers and telcos, and it has no effects on the providers themselves, you still need to trust their binaries. Open source and audited open repositories were never more relevant.