[bostik]

OP reads like something I have played devil's advocate for. In an earlier discussion about WA vulnerabilities, one of the reported bugs was that as implemented, Facebook could have added themselves silently to any group chat, thus receiving with plaintext copies of all messages sent in the group from that point onwards. I then extrapolated that if they so chose, they could change their plumbing enough to make all chats group chats - even when they were between two people.

To be absolutely clear, there was not - neither back then, nor since - evidence of this being the case. But the technical capability and potential for such subversion was there at the time. I have not followed the domain news enough to know whether this is still the case.

What is available to WA and thus to governments, is the traffic pattern part. Who communicates with whom, when, how large the messages approximately are, and so on. The stuff our industry and journalists at large have chosen to call metadata[tm].

I stubbornly call the whole thing for what it is: traffic analysis. Old-school style.