The district superintendent has responded by blocking access to the message boards from school computers.
Indian authorities could then seek access to the messages from the corporation through a court order or other legal processes.
The researchers gained access to the messages through Twitter, using an interface that allows scientists as well as software developers to work with the data.
But the company refused to say whether it would hand over users' data without a court order, or give police access to the messages.
In January 2007, Mr. Mulcaire and Clive Goodman, the paper's royalty reporter, pleaded guilty to gaining access to the messages of aides to the royal family and were sentenced to prison.
In this case, however, a little-noticed provision in a 2008 law, expanding the definition of "foreign intelligence" to include "weapons of mass destruction," was used to justify access to the message.
Mr. Hartman's son, Todd Hartman, an environmental reporter at The Rocky Mountain News, was one of two reporters whose bylines appeared on the article quoting from the e-mail, but the elder Mr. Hartman said he had had no access to the messages.
In arguing, for example, that no technology is neutral, Morozov fails to identify one crucial characteristic of cryptographic systems: that it is vastly easier to scramble a message than it is to break the scrambling system and gain access to the message without the key.
In the autumn of 2006, the police notified only a handful of victims that their cellphone messages had been hacked, even though there was evidence that News of the World journalists might have gained access to the messages of nearly 4,000 people.
Messenger is designed so that a user can begin a conversation on desktop, carry it over to mobile, and then finish it on a tablet, something which is technologically very difficult to achieve with end-to-end encryption – the only sort of encryption which prevents the message carrier (in this case, Facebook) from having access to the message itself.
