Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
signal.org
signal.org
I actually believe that law enforcement has the legal right to subpoena information, with a judge's consent, while investigating criminal activity. This is exactly the solution to that problem. These platforms should want to know as little about you as possible.
If they had developers in, say, France, who would need to accept changes made somewhere else then a single country could not force such secret modifications.
Of course an app is actually a binary, so there must be a way to verify that code + compilation = the published binary.
For iOS users, that will be a death knell.
You press the only non-"give up" button at each stage and you're done.
Remember that Fortnite succeeded in convincing people to do this by the millions. It's not hard.
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced they could do this, but they would rather not because it's much harder, since it requires a special warrant with high evidence thresholds for each user. This reinforces the claim that what they really want is an ability to get any messaging data without a warrant, but they don't want to say so.
The Internet may interpret censorship as damage and route around it, but spy agencies interpret laws as inconveniences and ignore them.
As access closes in one place (i.e application layer), they will just get closer to the source (i.e operating system or supply chain)
> "... In a democratic country governed by the rule of law, indiscriminate spying on individuals cannot be allowed except with sufficient statutory safeguards, by following the procedure established by law under the Constitution ...
> We had made it clear to the learned Solicitor General on many occasions that we would not push the Respondent-Union of India to provide any information that may affect the national security concerns of the country. However, despite the repeated assurances and opportunities given, ultimately the Respondent-Union of India has placed on record what they call a "limited affidavit", which does not shed any light on their stand or provide any clarity as to the facts of the matter at hand.
> However, this does not mean that the State gets a free pass every time the spectre of "national security" is raised. National security cannot be the bugbear that the judiciary shies away from, by virtue of its mere mentioning. Although this Court should be circumspect in encroaching the domain of national security, no omnibus prohibition can be called for against judicial review.
> The Respondent-Union of India must necessarily plead and prove the facts which indicate that the information sought must be kept secret as their divulgence would affect national security concerns. They must justify the stand that they take before a Court. The mere invocation of national security by the State does not render the Court a mute spectator"
> ... We are not interested in knowing matters related to security or defence. We are only concerned to know whether Govt has used any method other than admissible under law ..."
Source: Supreme Court Constitutes Independent Expert Committee To Probe Pegasus Snooping Allegations - https://web.archive.org/web/20211029130706/https://www.livel...
The problem is abuse of that system.
Let's be clear There is no reason to assume that this type of thing is constrained to "just the type" the government can have their arm forced into admitting to.
PS: I didn’t notice the attachement. Yup, that’s _exactly_ what they send. Curious whether the suspect could recognise their creation date and know that they are being investigated that way--and whether that exposes Signal.
I read a good short story on the subject recently, "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...
I could be wrong but I was under the impression that the way end-to-end encryption worked (like what Signal claims, I thought) was it was physically impossible for them to decrypt (handover decrypted data (aka your messages) to a court of law) because the public/private keys are impossible to crack and also not known by Signal.
It sounds like this isn't the case whatsoever.
I don't really understand modern chat apps that talk about encryption. By no means am I a pro on the subject so I apologize in advance but... if you really don't want ANYBODY EVER snooping on your data network wise (unless they are holding one of the devices and reading the screen after it has been unlocked via passcode/biometric, etc.), can't you just tell your friend a key and exchange it offline and then communicate freely with no middleman? Or even, with a middleman... that is just transporting your data and doesn't know your agreed upon shared secret or keys.
How could a subpoena ever work against this kind of data?
can't you just tell your friend a key and exchange it offline and then communicate freely with no middleman
Yes, keywords are pubkey, fingerprint, diffie hellman. It’s easy to use, just run:
openssl genrsa -des3 -out private.pem 2048
openssl rsa -in private.pem -outform PEM -pubout -out public.pem
openssl rand -base64 32 > key.bin
openssl rsautl -encrypt -inkey id_rsa.pub.pem -pubin -in key.bin -out key.bin.enc
openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -salt -in message.txt -out message.enc -pass file:./key.bin
Then there's IPs. If you log IPs along with when someone connects, then an IP can often be tracked to a WiFi router, which then pins your location.
Most E2EE communication protocols will see (and thus potentially log) the time and destination of every message you send. If two people have been accused of conspiring to commit a crime, this could be material in forming the case. They may also store your contact list, but a sufficiently long list of messages sent will practically determine your contact list anyways.
Even just the time of messages could be important; if someone interviewed claimed to be in the shower at a certain time, but there were logs of a message being sent at that time, that's probably enough for an obstruction of justice charge to stick.
I guess you mean each time you connected to their server to retrieve messages? There is no "login" step, Signal doesn't have a log in process. Presumably a typical Signal client calls several times per day.
The record they provided says connection date and despite being supplied in milliseconds since the epoch the value appears to indeed represent a whole day not a specific time. So you're correct Signal could be lying and actually store the exact moment you last connected, for whatever that's worth, and we could not prove they don't have that info.
> Most E2EE communication protocols will see (and thus potentially log) the time and destination of every message you send
Signal doesn't know who sent messages among close friends, and optionally not anybody who sent messages to a sensitive account.
Let's take the example of a message I sent to my friend Chris. I know Chris, I've sent messages to him previously and he knows me, so I'm in his contacts list. As a result by default my Signal client keeps some "Sealed Sender" tokens for Chris. When I send a message to Chris, my client uses a token it learned from a previous conversation with Chris, but Signal doesn't know who I am, just that I have a valid token for sending messages to Chris. So it stores the message, and gives it to Chris. Chris's client can determine that this is a message from me, tialaramex, but the Signal service never knew who sent the message.
If one day Chris hates me and blocks me from sending messages, his client invalidates all Sealed Sender tokens, and begins issuing new ones to his other friends so they can continue to contact him.
Also, "Impossible" is not the right term. "Extraordinarily expensive" is a better one. And yes, anyone can share public keys with each other offline and have end-to-end encrypted communication without help from a service. But advertising companies and the govt are not incentivized to make that practice convenient, and people typically do what is most convenient.
Issue a subpoenas for something they know they can't architecturally fulfill? I would imagine the government will get mad and shut them down, no?
While you might forgive someone working for interior ministries, this is an automatism towards fearful stupidity. Benefits don't play are role here, it is exclusively about any potential security benefit, doesn't matter how small.
Sadly signal is based on phone numbers which I dislike, but other messengers should take note here.
It's the final dash on the icing of "politely F yourself". Compliant and accurate but "let me burn up a little bit _your_ time" (pun).
Made me smile.
It's probably fine here, but if you store it in binary, you should probably parse it into something human-readable.
Does anybody know if Apple's notifications are E2EE? I doubt that gov't doesn't have access to the push notifications...
Edit: wow people were fast to reply…
The same may or may not be true for Apple (I have no idea) but claiming it is irrelevant as an answer to a question about whether an _Apple_ technology is encrypted, is mind boggling to me.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...
Good grief, why would you do that? Just send a notification that data is ready and the when the app wakes, go get the remainder of the data from signal servers.
> [...] never include sensitive data or data that can be retrieved by other means in your payload. Instead, use notifications to alert the user to new information or as a signal that your app has data waiting for it.
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ne...
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...
The E2EE in Signal only protects the actual content of messages. In the case where Signal takes an assertive action, and the users are not paying any attention to their "safety numbers" (probably the most common case) they could in theory get message content with a MITM attack.
With an less assertive action (simply saving the data) Signal could get access to things like contacts and phone numbers.
Tutanota and Protonmail have both been forced in the past to take assertive actions to retain data as a result of legal warrants. Does American law even allow such warrants? If not then perhaps the USA is underrated as a place to base privacy oriented services.
They use sealed sender: https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
Private contact discovery: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
And a "Private Group System" which is supposed to keep group membership information from the server: https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/
Though of course they could still push malicious updates.
The private contact discovery depends on an Intel SGX hardware enclave on their server. Which is good in this case as it implies more work to bypass it but where is the ultimate trust here? Intel? Did Signal ever get this working?
In general Signal can just see what IP address/port picks up a particular user's pre-keys if they want to know who is talking to who.
> The E2EE in Signal only protects the actual content of messages.
> [By] (simply saving the data) Signal could get access to things like contacts and phone numbers.
And the linked blog posts show that for a few years now they've been working on limiting their own access to this kind of data --- i.e. it's not as simple as just saving it (like e.g. WhatsApp is able to and most likely doing 100% of the time to build social graphs).
Now of course all of those things are likely vulnerable to some attacks, but that's another discussion and it doesn't change the fact that Signal doesn't have immediate easy access in the way you claimed in your original comment. The fact is that there are some barriers and they'd have to put some effort into either disabling these protections or exploit flaws in them to get to the data.
Even worse - American laws allow the US government agencies to actually access the servers directly (or even add other servers or routers) in the data centre of the service provider, and the service provider is legally obliged to not tell anyone about it!
The Congressional response should be, "Do you have no other way of investigating these criminals?" "Could you not put an officer out to surveille them?", "Have you not seen the misuse that law enforcement has engaged in, with such capabilities? From petty revenge to stalking lovers who rejected them. Will you consent to mandatory surveillance of all law enforcement officers that is recorded and stored in a civil controlled repository so that officer conduct may be reviewed at any time?"
They won't say that of course. But they should.
Make it fully decentralized with economic incentives for node operators.
some projects trying to do this now are Status, Session, Sylo
Just make the network work based on open protocols, where anyone can run a server that interoperates with others. (Matrix.)
For the non-developer end-user, they can use one of the existing servers, who in theory could charge their users.
Yes, it would be hard to maintain branding cohesion, and the product/service would lose to a centralized service. However, transitioning to heterogenous social/messaging landscape (from current oligopolies) could make smaller services like that competitive.
IMO it’s not clear we should treat a legal/political issue with technical workarounds, it doesn’t seem sustainable.
I very much suspect that who is elected has nearly zero effect on spying programs.
If that happens, hopefully usage of p2p messaging apps like Briar or Status will gain more traction and usage.
Complying with such a request is going out of business.
> The only information Signal maintains that is encompassed by thesubpoena for any particular user account, identified through a phone number, is the time of account creation and the date of the account’s last connection to Signal servers. That is all. [2]
> [2] see e.g. https://signal.org/bigbrother
And those people who help you draft patents for your computer-related inventions? Also lawyers.
I think this should be implemented regardless. But the danger is they can easily say "sure; your turn". Some in law enforcement may even genuinely want to do that for its own sake.
I think that's a totally orthogonal thing to violating citizens' privacy and shouldn't be considered as leverage or a counterargument.
"Could you not put an officer out to surveille them?",
Your argument kind of falls on itself there --> We can surveil them in person, but not digitally?
Why?
I think the tech crowd has this wrong.
The issue - as you have indicated - is not 'By What Means To Surveil'.
The issues are: Legitimacy, Proportionality, Oversight.
Messages, tech, sign language, in person, phones or messaging pigeons, the issue remains the same:
Is there a legitimate reason for access?
Is the intervention proportional to the probability of cause, the ostensible crime, the risk to other citizens and the public good?
Is there authoritative Judicial oversight of the surveillance, and, is there sufficient Congressional oversight of the legality of the program?
Those are the questions.
Should police be able to tap Signal (or anything else) for data on anyone they want, for whatever they want, willy nilly without a Warrant or oversight?
Definitely not.
Should Apple be scanning content for crimes?
Probably not, but that's slightly more complicated.
Should the police be able to access the Signal messages of someone they apprehended at a murder scene wherein other suspects fled the scene, and are therefore likely the suspects accomplices?
Likely yes. Or at lest, most people would agree with it both in the pragmatic sense, and also the Constitutional sense.
Should the FBI be able to, with special permission of a Federal Judge, watch all cell tower transactions in 5x5 mile grid grid, while there's a literal manhunt on for literal terrorists during a literal state of emergency?
Probably yes again, it's hard because the proportionality and tactics are rare and unique.
The technology is a secondary issue.
Because, before the internet, when surveillance was a lot of work, this prevented the abuse that is mass surveillance.
Only now do we see how much democracy relied on this natural limitation of state power for civil rights. It was never just the need for warrants that maintained civil rights. Remember the Verizon FISA court order authorized surveillance of millions, and that was just one order of hundreds.
Power corrupts. State power should be sufficient, but minimal. Being allowed to do physical surveillance only is sufficient to reduce crime rates to the point where most people can safely neglect that crime exists at all, and it is less power because it does not scale.
You mention proportionality yourself. Proportionality means that something is not done if the same objective (finding a given murderer) can be achieved in a less rights-infringing way. Proportionality at the policy level, means that a surveillance power may not exist, if its objective (such as safety from murder, i.e. low rates of murder, high chance of finding murderers etc.) can be achieved without the power or with a power that is less likely to be abused or that infringes rights of suspects less. (I admit this is somewhat of an editorialization; the technical meaning of proportionality is in [1]. To be clear the existing legal proportionality principle does not try to directly minimize power; but it does usually present an obstacle whenever new powers are created by law)
Limiting power is simpler and less error-prone than allowing power and adding control structures like warrant requirements for the power. It is thus better, if the outcome is the same.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(law)#European...
> Likely yes. Or at le[a]st, most people would agree with it both in the pragmatic sense, and also the Constitutional sense.
Sure, but that is not the question. The question is: should Signal be forced to implement its software in a way that allows the police to access its messages?
Likewise, everyone also agrees that in person surveillance is in general legitimate, but that doesn't mean that we all agree that the government should be able dictate burdensome measures on third parties to make it easier to perform this surveillance: say require that the friends of the suspect keep notes on his whereabouts. Changing its architecture would cost Signal a lot of money and good will, and the suspect would probably not be very happy that his friends ratted him out as well.
They are not willing or able to do that for whatever reason, but the ability exists.
I agree the technology used is a secondary issue, but Law Enforcement got lazy when they were able to wire-tap phones willy nilly whenever they wanted. They need to get un-lazy again. They can do all they want to do without needing un-encrypted traffic, un-encrypted traffic just makes them not have to work as hard.
I'm fine with them having to work harder instead of them getting to see all the communications they could ever dream of.
I believe under those circumstances, the police should be able to apply to a judge for a warrant, and if probable cause is found and a warrant is issued, attempt to access the Signal messages of such a person. A requirement that they succeed has technological implications; Signal, the device, or both would have to contain a backdoor, or use security measures that are not very effective.
I am an absolutist on this question; I don't think governments should have the authority to mandate backdoors in products or services even if doing so would result in the prosecution of many criminals who otherwise go unpunished. For those who want to balance the government's interest in prosecuting criminals against secure and private communications, the question I would ask is: how often do investigations or prosecutions fail because it was impossible to access encrypted data with a court order? A precise answer might be difficult since the content of the encrypted data is unknowable, but an upper bound could be established by assuming such encrypted data is always incriminating.
Are they though? First it's "only" to catch the super-terrorists. Then it's only to catch the murderers. Then it's for VIP missing person cases. Then it's petty crime. Then it's for political opponents. Then nobody dares ask anymore about "legitimacy, proportionality, oversight."
When those in power grant themselves more power, the onus is on them to prove they can't abuse that power. Of course, the way power works is they have that choice and we don't.
In addition, I’d wager lots of politicians use it now for obvious reason’s.
Ergo that won’t happen. That being said, can’t blame DoJ for trying though.
Why are the previous subpoenas Signal Messenger LLC has refused not sufficient for this purpose?
And that's for hyper-partisan issues! I'm not sure there's any truly influential political group that would strongly oppose this. Thinking it's just the politicians who are unaware and/or disagree with the tech-minded is a mistake. The populace is less on our side re: surveillance than we'd hope.
As they say, “Put your money where your mouth is.”
In 1978, the ACLU successfully defended the right of neo-Nazis to march in the predominantly Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois. This action reflected their commitment to free speech, regardless of how offensive the speech might be. The movie "Skokie" and documentary "Mighty Ira" are based on this event-- I highly recommend them because this is an important piece of U.S. history.
In contrast, the modern ACLU has backed away from this stance. A leaked ACLU memo[1] says that before they take a free speech case, they will consider the "context of the proposed speech; the potential effect on marginalized communities; the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values; and the structural and power inequalities in the community in which the speech will occur."
[1] https://reason.com/2018/06/21/aclu-leaked-memo-free-speech/
There are many in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Civil_rights_organiza...
I usually never express it but this kind of stuff makes me proud of being an American. We need to double down on CR non-partisanly and non-negotiably.
I aspire to not hand them AWS dollars one day, but Aurora has been an amazing product for my business.
(Only EFF is really for this particular issue though)
that's probably the least worthy of the ones in the list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
Fighting against due process: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/see-you-court-aclu-sues...
claiming there's no men: https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1196877415810813955
and this: https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1199725066302308354
Telling families to discuss pronouns: https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1250795126584217602
and this: https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1453779768063766529
I'm all for defending freedom of expression, religion, speech, etc. But this is weighing into topics that aren't really about freedom and in some cases they're actively fighting against freedom. AKA it's become way more political and one sided.
I think there's an argument to be made for the ACLU becoming increasingly performative, with catchy Twitter slogans edging out the real work, but this isn't it.
1634169600000 (unix millis)
Thursday, October 14, 2021 12:00:00 AM
Couldn't they easily use the phone number associated with the Signal account to find the target's name? Even if the account uses a pre-paid SIM without a credit card attached, the telco could still reveal the location of the device and probably its IMEI, which could be used to find other SIMs associated with it.
I think Signal should stop pretending they're an anonymous service when their identity is based on phone numbers.
What do you mean? They already have the telephone number. It is listed in the subpoena. All Signal is doing is confirming that this phone number has a Signal account - sure, it's not perfect, but I don't really see your point. They don't need Signal to be able to do any of the things you listed.
This means they minimize the information that is in the clear and do this quite well.
Now to your specific concern about the phone number. Signal only has your phone number and sign up time. This means that for someone to request your information, they’ll pretty much need that already. If you look at the subpoena you’ll see that the FBI is asking for data associated with the persons name or phone number. Name is something Signal doesn’t have. You’re right that it’s trivial to get with the phone number (and the FBI has obviously done this), but they must necessarily have this information to even request data from Signal.
In other words, Signal doesn’t provide a means of leaking your name. What using a phone number identifier does do is allow someone to go from name to phone number to Signal request, though that Signal request with turn up very little data.
https://www.aclu.org/ https://signal.org/
Nothing is free, support these folks.
Account created: 1606866784432 (unix millis)
There are very many ways to encrypt messaging data by sharing public keys. There are also several decentralized, federated encrypted messenger apps. They are great options for folks, but frankly aren’t as easy to use or feature rich and thus not as widely used.
-Ultimately this issue isn't that big of a deal to law enforcement. In 99% of cases they can just get the defendant's cell phone and look at his unencrypted messages in the Signal and Whatsapp applications directly.
-I think in theory if a lot of platforms start doing end to end encryption globally, then things could get a little more interesting. But as far as I know for a lot of tech stacks (like ones more complex than simple messaging) that's difficult to do.
please stop asking for mandatory phone number to register and use Signal.
This raises privacy concerns and negates all the end-to-end encryption goodness you're offering.
Identifying users is one thing, reading their message is another. People can still deny and not answer questions.
What matters is the messages being encrypted, identifying users is already being made possible through other means.
So yeah, using a phone number is good enough, in my view.
There is no perfect security, there is only "good enough" security.
Not to mention that phone numbers are more secure, in my view, than other sorts of digital communications, and are not always monitored in all countries.
It literally does not. Source: the OP
Using a phone number means that an agency can ask Signal if you have a Signal account, but they can’t access any other info about you.
Certainly saying "I know that Janis and Nate talked on this day this many times / for this long" and "Janis and Nate had a detailed conversation covering lemons and lye" have two different levels of private information revelation; and E2E protects against the latter but not necessarily the former, so why does it negate _all_ the goodness?
I find it really interesting that Bill Binney says, despite years of me hearing the opposite, that we shoild all be rolling our own crypto because its a form of decentralization. The more time goes on, the more I think hes onto something.
The main problem I see is this: a future where only the hackers have privacy, and everyone else apathetically accepts their servitude and abuse. Furthermore, to maintain that privacy, hackers will have to be extremely selective in their friends, due to the invasive nature of the privacy violations from those around us, unbeknownst to them.
Matrix is pretty good.
Solid impenetrable encryption from a neutral and privacy obsessed country. All a careful front for the CIA. The encryption was solid as far as I know but they the CIA had a back door.
If there was a backdoor into the system somehow, it would be perfect to have stories such as the above to recruit criminals or even foreign intelligence to adopt it.
As far as I know Signal is 100% legit and deliveres what they promise. and I use it myself.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/11/crypto-ag-ci...
The account creation date is basically equivalent to the phone number and would allow the owner of the account to know a subpoena was requested for them.
Most "donate" pages do not allow for "donor-advised funds (DAF)." They assume you're giving it with your before-tax money and presumably taking a tax deduction for it.
In a DAF, which your financial institution surely offers, you can donate appreciated assets, e.g. your FAANG stock, and take the entire amount as a tax deduction. So if your 10 shares of Facebook (excuse me, "Meta") stock are at 322, you can take a deduction of $32,200 this year.
What's the catch? That money's gone, and you can't get it back. You can only "advise" your DAF to give it to a 501(c)(3) organization, which Signal is. There are no time limits.
The good part, though, is you can probably have your DAF give the money anonymously, so the charity can't bug you every time they're having a fund drive.
So that money goes to charity, but what charities? You won't be here, obviously. When you're looking into this, see if your DAF administrator allows a "successor trustee." If not, that institution itself (Schwab, Vanguard, whatever) will disburse it.
If they do, you can pick someone whose values you trust to be the successor & disburse the money. (Probably someone younger than you!) You should ask them, or else they'll get a real surprising phone call right after you die.
Also, the annual stock deduction limit is capped at 30% or so of income.
Like, let's say your intent is to donate $10k to some charity, out of the goodness of your heart and/or as a tax write off. You don't have that in cash, but do in stock.
You could liquidate $10k of stock, pay capital gains on it (if it appreciated since acquisition), then donate it. So you're out the capital gains tax.
The method you describe seems more efficient, since you don't need to sell; you simply transfer ownership of the asset.
Or is there still capital gains to be paid?
I wonder if billionaires are setting up charities as trusts for their kids, then "donating their shares to charity?"
Billionaires have access to much fancier schemes than this, and I won't even attempt to describe all those. But yeah, I imagine "donating their shares without capital gains taxes" figures into them.
I just noticed you said "trusts for their kids" -- that's something different. If the children can access it, it's not a DAF. But trusts are much more complicated, and someone who understands them (which I don't) can hold forth here.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/how-billionaires-pass-wea...
I thought the ACLU was more of a protection against smaller entities who didn't have funding/legal firepower?
Edit: What raised my eyebrow is that the subpoena specifically asks for that. Why?
Additionally, Signal's encryption scheme gives their messages the "forward secrecy" property which means that acquiring key material at some point in the future does not allow you to decrypt any previous messages. Any encrypted messages that they could provide would be useless.
For more, check out their really interesting doc on the double ratchet algorithm that they use!:
The government is funded by its Citizens.
I remember a time when spying on EVERYONE was a bad thing.
There's also no mention of TLS termination in the Signal-Server repository on GitHub, or TLS between the Redis cluster in use. If FBI or NSA has compromised the AWS VPC, then all of this network traffic would be in the clear to be picked up behind the load balancer(s).
The Account DynamoDB table [2] also seems to indicate more information is tied to the phone number in cleartext than what is indicated by the response?
[0]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server/blob/14f5271c2012...
[1]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server/blob/14f5271c2012...
[2]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server/blob/14f5271c2012...
The DB table looks like signal creates UUIDs to represent users and devices. This isn’t really sensitive information but really just how you can see and revoke devices associated with your account. Maybe I’m misreading something tough. Do you have any reason to believe otherwise?
Note that disabling iCloud Backup won't help you, as it's turned on by default and everyone else you iMessage with will be leaking your conversation plaintext to Apple for you.
Disable iMessage. Use Signal exclusively.
* if you use Messages in iCloud, iCloud Backup instead backs up the cross-device sync key instead of the iMessages themselves, which means Apple gets your iMessages in real time as they sync between your iCloud devices, instead of once per day
https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1ZK1CT is why fake pro-privacy Apple will never be able to run a story like Signal has here today.
> Why, on any planet, would law enforcement issue a warrant to get user data from a company that doesn't have any user data?
Signal erases that kind of information but I'm pretty sure that user must have had some messages delivered to them while signal was processing the subpoena. So pretenting they don't know anything else is just wrong IMO.
If you have a phone number, a zero-click NSO spyware would provide full control over target device.
* FBI could get user’s data from Apple if it’s an iPhone (considering that iOS is closed source), or force a malicious update to user through so many ways (including by pushing a bad update or manipulating safety numbers in signal).
So why asking a messaging app that everyone knows doesn’t have the requested information?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI–Apple_encryption_dispute
This threat is why there need to be checks on the power of the state to conduct searches, one of which is privacy technology like encrypted communication networks.
They've only gotten used to going after the intermediary, and it feels uncomfortable for them to have this power removed and reset back to the mean.
When encryption and secure messaging is outlawed, only outlaws will have and use it.
Even if Signal operators can't provide them metadata, maybe they found ways to snoop on traffic.
> Last connection date: 1634169600000 (unix millis)
> Account created: 1606866784432 (unix millis)
Impressively small amount of information. I wonder Account Created needs to be stored?
> Account created: 1606866784432 (unix millis)
This response of the user information they have is hilarious.
Thu 14 Oct 2021 12:00:00 AM UTC
Do they round?
They must keep this data hot because they can send "this specific person in your phonebook just installed signal" messages.
https://www.aclu.org/ https://signal.org/donate/
Nothing is free, support these folks.
Now don't pull any sketchy shit like Mobilecoin without being transparent.
What are you arguing for? Visible transaction histories that can be used to jail you?
Now, cops and politicians want to solve all the problems from their desk.
No, sorry, my freedom is not to be sold for their convenience.
You want to catch a bad guy, you get a trained investigation team that follows people, that wires their house, that interrogates neighborhood, etc.
Is it more work ? Yes. Is it more dangerous ? Hell, yes.
But don't say you can't catch criminals because of Signal. What you can't do, is click on a button to spy on people. It's a good thing.
This mantra is just an excuse to chew off chunks of democracy.
Absolutely.
>In formulating your statement that examining criminal behavior is a problem, you are suggesting there shouldn’t be ways to uncover crimes.
I didn't get that at all. Before Signal and other encrypted apps, folks who didn't want to be spied upon would meet in person, in private places or write messages in code.
That didn't stop the police from bringing down many criminals, such as Al Capone, the New York Mafia and many others, did it? Nope, it didn't.
What you seem to be advocating is that everyone's privacy should be forfeited so police can get information without doing, you know, police work.
I'm all for bringing criminals (especially violent ones) to justice. But I'm not willing to give up my privacy so that police can spend their time eating donuts instead of their jobs.
Feel free to disagree, but I'm going to keep using Signal and be glad of it -- not because I'm involved in criminal activity, but because I value my privacy.
But I’d say that we should work to make it impossible for mass surveillance to exist, full stop.
Police should have to do real actual detective work to implicate people in a crime.
But when the authorities transgress once too many, the public in general will switch to services that properly defends their privacy.
We can consider this a game-theoretic outcome of abusing the trust of the public. The consequence will eventually be that properly henious criminals will have better tools for not getting caught.
The privacy/security trade-off is vastly overstated.
Your statement is carefully crafted to sidestep this with the wording, "...there exists criminal behavior that most reasonable people would agree is bad and should be stopped that may reach a dead end with services like Signal...", ignoring that the crime of abuse of power is far greater than any crime that could be prevented when it'd granted.
There will always be "some people" that think this way. But more certainly such powers will be abused by those entrusted with them.
What argument do you have that less encryption is the preferred solution?
Until all of that changes I am not interested in giving them more ammo.
That's reasonable.
You have added that last line yourself, and it appears to suggest that you would prefer all of humanity be constantly surveilled in case it may catch more criminals.
Any backdoor - any! - will result in your data being exposed, sooner or later. Your Signal messages could then be exposed in a data breach on the dark web for all to see.
It is not worth it to risk everyone's privacy to allow for the chance at easily prosecuting a small number of crimes. Remember - you're not preventing crime this way, just allowing for easy evidence capture. There are viable alternative ways of investigating crimes, as others here have said. There are not viable alternative ways of protecting our data.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
Now is the time to speak out. By the time you want to protest and push back, it could be too late.
Who exactly said this? It's rather the other way around: flagrantly examining and being able to examine non-criminal behaviour at a whim is a problem. The excuse of potentially being able to spot criminal behaviour is not enough.
Privacy with end-to-end encryption keeps everyone's communications safe. Criminals, politicians, people working for government contractors, and everyone else. This means criminals can get away with more things. It also means that politicians and surveillance governments have a harder time monitoring regular people or their government challengers.