Police in Brazil have released a Senior Facebook Executive arrested over a dispute regarding a court order to produce data from its WhatsApp messaging service.

Facebook Vice President for Latin America Diego Dzodan was released following a Sergipe State court decision by judge Ruy Pinheiro, who considered the detention of Diego Dzodan in Sao Paulo on Tuesday “unlawful coercion.”

“It seems to me that the extreme measure of imprisonment was hurried,” Pinheiro is reported to have said.

Dzodan had originally been arrested by order of a lower court judge and stood accused of “repeated non-compliance with court orders.”

The case pertains to an order demanding detailed logs of chat conversations from WhatsApp relating to an organized crime and drug-trafficking investigation, although authorities have refused to provide further details of the case ostensibly because doing so “could compromise an ongoing criminal investigation.”

WhatsApp is a fully owned subsidiary of Facebook but is run independently from Facebook and uses end-to-end encryption meaning that the company has no way of accessing and passing on the conversations request by the court to begin with.

“We are disappointed with the extreme and disproportionate measure of having a Facebook executive escorted to a police station in connection with a case involving WhatsApp, which operates separately from Facebook,” Facebook said in a statement, before adding “always been and will be available to address any questions Brazilian authorities may have.”

Brazilian authorities have imposed fines, starting with 50,000 reais ($12,500) daily beginning two months ago, and which rose to 1 million reais ($250,000) a month ago.

iPhone case parallels

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) makes a good point in noting the parallels to the current case between the Department of Justice and Apple, where the former is trying to force the latter to comply with its orders.

“There’s a parallel here with what is happening in the United States in the Apple San Bernardino case,” the EFF said in a blog post. “In both cases, prosecutors are seeking to bend to their will precedent, technology, and technology companies in the pursuit of high-profile targets, Judges cannot expect companies to break the laws of mathematics, nor retrospectively rewrite their entire application in pursuit of prosecutorial aims. And neither can they expect those companies to stride deliberately into legal paradoxes, where complying with a court demand in one country would lead them to violate the law in another.”

It’s not clear where the issue in Brazil goes from here, but, at least some sanity has prevailed and Dzodan is once again a free man.

Image credit: felipeskroski/Flickr/CC by 2.0