Police in Brazil have arrested a senior executive from social networking giant Facebook, Inc. over a dispute regarding a court order to produce data from its WhatsApp messaging service.

Facebook Vice President for Latin America Diego Dzodan was arrested by Brazilian Federal Police in Sao Paulo state following a ruling from a judge in Sergipe State, in the country’s North East.

The court itself appears to be  demanding detailed logs of chat conversations relating to an organized crime and drug-trafficking investigation, with the arrest due to the fact that they claim Facebook/ WhatsApp have failed to comply; that said according to Reuters law enforcement officials are withholding further information about the nature of the requests, say that doing so “could compromise an ongoing criminal investigation.”

WhatsApp said in a statement that it was highly disappointed with the arrest, given that it is unable to provide information it doesn’t have due to the encryption used in the app itself.

“We cooperated to the full extent of our ability in this case and while we respect the important job of law enforcement, we strongly disagree with its decision,” the statement read.

Facebook issued a separate statement, saying that they were “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,” before adding that they have “always been and will be available to address any questions Brazilian authorities may have.”

Dzodan has been at Facebook for less than a year and also works for photo-sharing site Instagram, but notably doesn’t work with the WhatsApp team.

Crazy

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff clearly hasn’t read Dale Carnegie’s seminal work How To Win Friends and Influence People as the decision to arrest a Facebook employee breaks all the rules when it comes to the “hello, we’re a freedom loving democracy” game.

Mike Masnick over at Techdirt says it far better than I can:

Arresting execs of tech companies because you don’t like the way they operate their business seems like a good way to make sure innovative internet services are not offered in your country at all. And, in this case, where Facebook relies on strong encryption in Whatsapp, it seems likely that the issue may be that it was impossible to comply with the court order in this case (though the full details are not yet known). Either way, arresting an exec over this seems extremely troubling — especially in a country such as Brazil that has been trying to set itself up as a strong supporter of a free and open internet, and that had argued against surveillance.

WhatsApp passed the 1 billion user mark back in February.

Image credit: playamongfriends/Flickr/CC by 2.0