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Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

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Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#201

Post by dragonwriter »

dheera wrote: post #198
dragonwriter wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attorneys for parties ina case are not witnesses, can’t be cross-examined, and are not permitted to just introduce fact claims into evidence themselves. They have to ask questions of witnesses, who are the subject to cross examination. There a very good reasons for it even if it isn’t maximally entertaining viewing.

> introduce fact claims I'm sure everyone would agree that people have eyes and phones and that a phone can take pictures. Why is that a fact claim? Just show the pictures. And then ask real questions, like "what do you see" "oh look someone's knee on someone's neck". I hate inefficiency.

> I'm sure everyone would agree that people have eyes and phones and that a phone can take pictures. Why is that a fact claim? Just show the pictures.

Every single one of those questions is establishing a fact in the record without which the opposing counsel would potentially have grounds to object to the presentation of the pictures. You can’t just show pictures without an explanation through facts themselves introduced as evidence, whether by testimony or otherwise, unless freely stipulated by the opposing party, of what the evidence is, where it came from, and why it is relevant.

Again, yeah, it makes crappy theater. The rules are about due process for the parties in a case, not keeping the proceedings engaging for an audience.

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#202

Post by anigbrowl »

dheera wrote: post #198
dragonwriter wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attorneys for parties ina case are not witnesses, can’t be cross-examined, and are not permitted to just introduce fact claims into evidence themselves. They have to ask questions of witnesses, who are the subject to cross examination. There a very good reasons for it even if it isn’t maximally entertaining viewing.

> introduce fact claims I'm sure everyone would agree that people have eyes and phones and that a phone can take pictures. Why is that a fact claim? Just show the pictures. And then ask real questions, like "what do you see" "oh look someone's knee on someone's neck". I hate inefficiency.

Book suggestion: Adversarial Legalism by Robert Kagan.

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#203

Post by dheera »

dragonwriter wrote: post #201
dheera wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> introduce fact claims I'm sure everyone would agree that people have eyes and phones and that a phone can take pictures. Why is that a fact claim? Just show the pictures. And then ask real questions, like "what do you see" "oh look someone's knee on someone's neck". I hate inefficiency.

> I'm sure everyone would agree that people have eyes and phones and that a phone can take pictures. Why is that a fact claim? Just show the pictures. Every single one of those questions is establishing a fact in the record without which the opposing counsel would potentially have grounds to object to the presentation of the pictures. You can’t just show pictures without an explanation through facts themselves introd…

To what extent does that go? Why don't they ask:

"Humans have legs right?"

"And how many legs do you have?"

"And legs can be used for locomotion right?"

"And you used those legs to translate your body to the location of the mobile phone right?"

"Oh yeah, you have a body, right? I forgot to ask"

"And there are these appendages called arms right?"

"How many arms do you have?"

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#204

Post by busymom0 »

Taniwha wrote: post #183
korethr wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will offer a counter-example to this. I was an alternate for my local county's grand jury for a year. I was selected through the same voir dire process used to place me on a petit jury for a criminal trial years later. It was wholly random. AFAIK, I didn't end up in the jury pool because I knew a prosecutor or cop. Were "I know a guy who knows a guy" the selection criteria, I would have never ended up on the grand…

The main difference I assume is that for a normal jury the defendant can challenge jurors, while for a grand jury the defendant often doesn't even know it is sitting on their case.

I could be wrong but my understanding is that grand jury is sort of like a trial jury (trail as in demo/mock, not a court trial) to show the evidence and case from the prosecutor side only in order to get an indictment. You can perform a grand jury multiple times in order to get the outcome indictment you need to finally charge someone. If you can’t convince a grand jury to get an indictment, then you will have an even harder time when the case goes to actual court with the defence being present with their own side of story. So I guess there’s pros and cons to this. Ultimately the actual court trial is what matters but of course an indictment is mostly enough to destroy someone’s reputation even if they get acquitted later on (I think government has a 95%+ success rate or something).

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#206

Post by upofadown »

daneel_w wrote: post #186

"It’s the same set of “Account and Subscriber Information” that we provided in 2016: Unix timestamps for when each account was created and the date that each account last connected to the Signal service. That’s it." Signal offers a "registration lock" for the phone number used to register the account, so that another user cannot register using the same number (i.e. reusing VLNs and similar). If "that's it", then wher…

Presumably they have a database of hashes. But they are already providing the information that the phone number is in use in their system. That is the only information that the hash represents.

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#207

Post by fedorareis »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #190
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That metadata is not available, though.

It would be if they said they didn't know each other. It could figure in to determination of reasonable doubt. That can certainly be useful. The NSA has done plenty with metadata.

But that metadata literally doesn’t exist. Signal knows when Person X created their account and when Person Y created there account. But the know nothing about the relationship between the 2 people. As far as Signal’s metadata is concerned everyone is a stranger that has never contacted another person.

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#208

Post by PeterisP »

sicco wrote: post #75
airhead969 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Lavabit. Centralized is never raid/DDoS-proof. Okay boys, take all these servers because evidence is hiding on them and these lefty pinkos aren't helping us find it. Let's get them back to the lab to find out what that evidence is.

Afaik, Signal uses AWS. Is a raid/confiscation of AWS servers even possible?

Of course, Amazon is a US company, so with the proper subpoena from a US court AWS technicians will [have to] deliver images of the virtual servers and/or remove them and/or modify them or whatever else is requested, without the right to inform the customer if the subpoena says so.

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#209

Post by spurgu »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #193
spurgu wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself. I am a criminal and I'm happy that Signal has my back. In fact I'd argue that anyone who is not a criminal is probably quite a boring and uninteresting person.

Most people break laws every day without even knowing it.

Exactly. And everyone probably knows a particular junction where the Stop sign is waaaay more of a guideline than a rule and when there's no traffic there's little point in following it - expending expensive (for the wallet as well as the planet) dinosaur juice - just to adhere to the principle of following laws to the letter.

Traffic is probably one of the easiest examples where disobeying the law makes a ton of sense multiple times per day/week.

I would not want any entity to be able to track my history of these kinds of felonies committed multiple times per week (not related to Signal though, but keeping track in general).

And don't get me started on drugs. Crime has gone down a lot by decriminalizing marijuana for example. "Crime".

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#210

Post by theamk »

There is still a huge hole: all the contact info is available anyway in the phone's address book. Assuming the common practice of syncing that address book to the cloud, the prosecutors just need to subpoena Google or Apple, and they get full Signal contact list of each person.

I am amazed that Signal claims to be private while requiring all chat participants to expose their government-regulated phone number often tied to the legal identity.

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