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Perhaps the government only cares about who is calling who and for how long?

Aren't the whatsapp messages sent over the net? I.e. wouldn't it be the case that the government could only see the outgoing IP address? I guess if they were very well organized and working with the telecoms, they could then maybe see the outgoing IP and assuming that IP were on a telecom network they also controlled they could turn that into a person. This is all assuming that they could even figure out which encrypted outgoing packets correspond to calls (maybe this isn't too bad considering call streams would maybe have a fairly standard packet rate, etc.?).

Either way seems pretty hard without direct help from whatsapp.

It's Facebook that has access to this metadata.

> While the metadata is encrypted during transit, phone numbers, timestamps, connection duration, connection frequency, as well as user location are being stored on the company’s servers [0]

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.06817.pdf

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