Why has the dynamic become, the Government and it's Citizen's being seperate from one another.
The government is funded by its Citizens.
I remember a time when spying on EVERYONE was a bad thing.
Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
121–130 of 618 posts
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
The snark of providing the timestamps as unredacted values was fabulous.
I don't know if it's a snark. It's probably the right thing to provide legally. It's literally the records they have.
I would agree. If you're saying this is the only data I have, give it in the exact form you have it in.
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#123It’s easy so say net win for society is privacy. But it’s important to also acknowledge it does come at a cost — 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. In formulating your statement that examining criminal behavior is a problem, you are suggesting there shouldn’t be ways to uncover crimes.
No. They’re suggesting that law enforcement should have a valid reason to request someone’s private data such as this process. 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.
The Fourth Amendment clearly states that law enforcement has to have a subpoena where a judge agrees there's a valid reason to demand private property, with very limited exceptions.
E2E does not require a valid reason. Its only change as far as law enforcement is concerned is to stop monitoring when they do have a valid reason. (Which I think most people feel is as acceptable trade-off.)
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a dead end with Signal. But it requires field work, as they used to do 50 years ago. 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 dangero…
So you want cost the taxpayer significantly with potentially months of unneeded work and expose cops to potentially more danger to ultimately arrive at the same result? How exactly is this better?
> to ultimately arrive at the same result
[citation needed]
Further:
Wiretapping is illegal without a warrant. I believe the spirit of the law there implied that wiretapping of [previous, historical conversations] was _always_ illegal, since a wiretap could only be tracking future conversations by its very nature.
The nature of communication has changed, such that all conversations theoretically have a permanent, historical record, despite the intention of those conversations to not have that historical record. It's called "instant messaging", after all, not "perpetual letter writing". It's meant to be an analogue to talking directly with one another.
The path we've gone down where everyone uses a third party to communicate with each other, and that that third party could theoretically record and retain all communications back and forth in perpetuity does not change the _intent_ of the laws as they were written.
The laws were to protect everyone from unreasonable review of their historical actions.
Perhaps you remember that story - I've completely forgotten the source and am having trouble finding it - about the person taken in the night and thrown in front of a judge. He asked what his crimes were, and the judge said "that's what we're here to find out", as they were going to go through everything he'd ever done to find something to charge him with.
edit: another instance would be Lavrentiy Beria, a police chief under Stalin (https://www.oxfordeagle.com/2018/05/09/show-me-the-man-and-i...)
"Show me the man, I'll show you the crime."
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#125Beautiful. That's how you do it. 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.
Yes, although the way around this for law enforcement is to pressure Apple and Google to remove Signal from the App Store/Play respectively (to protect children!) and work on operating system level bypasses of Signal. I am fearing this scenario.
For android that will be annoying to users: sideloading is a bit technical.
For iOS users, that will be a death knell.
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#126>Because everything in Signal is end-to-end encrypted by default, the broad set of personal information that is typically easy to retrieve in other apps simply doesn’t exist on Signal’s servers. 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 co…
As far as I understand Signal can't just save all the data because of how the app/server are architected: 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 th…
Sealed sender only means Signal doesn't know who sent a particular message. They have to know who the recipient is so they can deliver it. Like forging the "From:" address on an email. Except in the Signal case the IP address/port of the sender is unique to the user and if the recipient responds then the link between the users is made.
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.
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#127Beautiful. That's how you do it. 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.
Yes, although the way around this for law enforcement is to pressure Apple and Google to remove Signal from the App Store/Play respectively (to protect children!) and work on operating system level bypasses of Signal. I am fearing this scenario.
I wonder how far they could go in compelling Signal to push a change that let more info leak for a specific user. I know there have been somewhat similar cases where companies were compelled to add new functionality, logs, etc, to capture info for a specific user.
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US government is too caught up in prosecuting victimless crimes, bullying defendants into taking plea deals (and forfeiting their right to a fair trial), handing out cruel sentences, and using evidence borne from illegal searches (while lying about it). Until all of that changes I am not interested in giving them more ammo.
Right because until some bar that can never be met is satisfied, let's let anything go? Sorry, that's not the society I want to live in.
The bar is "executing justice doesn't regularly cause more harm than the harm it claims to prevent." It's basically on the floor.
Well, the other bar is "the justice system follows its own rules." That's reasonable enough to ask, isn't it?
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#129It’s easy so say net win for society is privacy. But it’s important to also acknowledge it does come at a cost — 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. In formulating your statement that examining criminal behavior is a problem, you are suggesting there shouldn’t be ways to uncover crimes.
The net benefit to society when government is granted and/or authority is granted broad powers of surveillance is the abuse of that power to serve the desires of those in power rather than society in general.
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.
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#130Why has the dynamic become, the Government and it's Citizen's being seperate from one another. The government is funded by its Citizens. I remember a time when spying on EVERYONE was a bad thing.
Was that day 9/10/2001? I remember those days, too. I miss some parts of them.