Dope article
Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
171–180 of 618 posts
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#172While I applaud Signal's response I expect this entire event (subpoena and response) will be provided as one of the exhibits to congress by the Department of Justice to justify their request that it be unlawful to provide such services. The DoJ will say, "See, here is this horrible crime we are investigating and because this company chose to make it impossible for law enforcement, with a warrant and a subpoena to get…
Making this unlawful would violate the constitution. People are already upset at the Federal Government, now isn't the time for more bullshit.
Making it unlawful to operate this kind of service would be a very bad idea, but it's far from clear that it's unconstitutional, and I would expect courts to rule otherwise if Congress decides to impose more logging requirements.
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Half of the people in Congress don't really understand what this is all about; the other half who understands, uses Signal.
Well, I guess we're "lucky" that you have to have well more than half of Congress on board to get anything done...
Unfortunately, the sentence "half of the people in Congress use Signal" is only true for very small values of "half".
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing any company can do about that. Spying programs and laws will only worsen unless people really voice their concerns and elect the right people.
> Spying programs and laws will only worsen unless people really voice their concerns and elect the right people. I very much suspect that who is elected has nearly zero effect on spying programs.
I'm not sure which was intended, but I think this is much more accurate as a cynical comment on human nature than some comment on "shadow government/deep state" type stuff.
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#175While I applaud Signal's response I expect this entire event (subpoena and response) will be provided as one of the exhibits to congress by the Department of Justice to justify their request that it be unlawful to provide such services. The DoJ will say, "See, here is this horrible crime we are investigating and because this company chose to make it impossible for law enforcement, with a warrant and a subpoena to get…
Making this unlawful would violate the constitution. People are already upset at the Federal Government, now isn't the time for more bullshit.
The single most clear political lesson of the past decade is that using power, even blatantly cynically, when you have it, won't produce much of a backlash. Your fans will just wait until the "other team" does it to complain.
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.
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#176It’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.
Apart from just not having encrypted data, the only way to achieve what you're suggesting is with a government backdoor into the encryption.
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.
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#177The latest installment in the "Government doesn't understand math" series
This isn't their first rodeo. The DOJ is well aware of what happens when they send subpoenas to Signal. They're not sending it because they're unaware of the probable result.
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#178While I applaud Signal's response I expect this entire event (subpoena and response) will be provided as one of the exhibits to congress by the Department of Justice to justify their request that it be unlawful to provide such services. The DoJ will say, "See, here is this horrible crime we are investigating and because this company chose to make it impossible for law enforcement, with a warrant and a subpoena to get…
I think turning it into a press release / advertising pitch is a poor move that's likely to make harsh new legislation more, not less, likely.
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm surprised the FBI has tried to get a custom keyboard into the Play Store yet, or asked Google to add a key logger to the stock one. Sure, the legality is blury at the moment , but it's just a matter of changing some laws and then that becomes legal.
They could just product a service that masquerades as a grammar checker provider.
Come to think of it, that'd be the perfect place to go to demand a wiretap - at least one such popular "LY" service already exists.
I'm still shaking my head at what many regular users will agree to..
Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
#180While I applaud Signal's response I expect this entire event (subpoena and response) will be provided as one of the exhibits to congress by the Department of Justice to justify their request that it be unlawful to provide such services. The DoJ will say, "See, here is this horrible crime we are investigating and because this company chose to make it impossible for law enforcement, with a warrant and a subpoena to get…
Making this unlawful would violate the constitution. People are already upset at the Federal Government, now isn't the time for more bullshit.
secret FISA courts are also against the constitution, yet here we are.