How did the investigative agency retrieve data from Rhea Chakraborthy’s phone? WhatsApp maintains that there is end-to-end encryption for all their messages, but it adds a note that the media and messages you back up to Google Drive or to any such cloud services, aren’t protected by WhatsApp end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption means that the messages are visible only to the sender and recipient.
So, to access encrypted WhatsApp data, sources say investigative agencies take a user’s phone and create a ‘clone’ of it on another device. With this, the agencies create what is called a ‘mirror image’ of your phone, and copy and then transfer all the data onto the separate device.
Agencies can, with the help of forensic experts, retrieve all kinds of data like phone call records, messages, images, WhatsApp chats, as well as the data on your phone’s cloud service, like Google Drive or iCloud, including anything that has been deleted. Cloud services help you store and access data on the Internet.
A user’s WhatsApp message log can also be accessed through the chat backups that are saved to a user’s phone periodically. All your WhatsApp chats get downloaded as a backup file onto your phone, as a folder in your storage folder, or gets uploaded onto a cloud server, like Google Drive or iCloud.
