Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

signal.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 618 posts

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

#181

Post by [deleted] »

swiley wrote: post #156
ChuckMcM wrote: post #119

While 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.

[deleted]

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

#182

Post by egberts1 »

ylk wrote: post #39
akouri wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you craft a push notification server-side, it contains the payload in plaintext. Now, that is probably encrypted in Apple-land, but my point is that the gov't probably has sunk its teeth into Apple already. So, yea signal's encryption may be open source and proven, but I doubt Apple's doesn't have a backdoor.

I mean Apple themselves is telling devs to not send sensitive data in the actual notification > [...] 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...

that’s why Signal sends an empty notification then uses their own EE2E for notification wordings.

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

#183

Post by MuffinFlavored »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #23

Beautiful. 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.

> This is exactly the solution to that problem.

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?

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

#184

Post by kube-system »

kps wrote: post #80
vmception wrote: post #51

> Last connection date: 1634169600000 (unix millis) > Account created: 1606866784432 (unix millis) This response of the user information they have is hilarious.

> Last connection date: 1634169600000 (unix millis) Thu 14 Oct 2021 12:00:00 AM UTC Do they round?

It's likely a date value (as literally stated) rather than date-time. It's not 'rounded' as much as the time value is simply not present.

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

#185

Post by ranger_danger »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #119

While 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…

Or perhaps more likely, they'll go the lavabit/CALEA route, and order that their platform be modified to allow wiretapping, at which point Signal must choose between either complying with such requests, or going out of business.

If that happens, hopefully usage of p2p messaging apps like Briar or Status will gain more traction and usage.

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

#186

Post by ATsch »

majormajor wrote: post #174
craftinator wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

As defines so much of society and what people claim is "human nature", there is no need for shadow governments or deep states when you have power structures and incentives. Those scale, conspiracies don't.

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

#187

Post by loeg »

AlbertCory wrote: post #19
fmakunbound wrote: post #4

Reminds me to donate to Signal again

Speaking of donations (a guy from a food bank whom I see in the Safeway parking lot didn't know this, so I think we can assume not everyone does): 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 FA…

Yeah, with a DAF you have the administrator cut a check to the qualified beneficiary.

Also, the annual stock deduction limit is capped at 30% or so of income.

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

#188

Post by singron »

craftinator wrote: post #136
arthur_sav wrote: post #133

Earlier 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.

This is definitely not true. Dianne Feinstein for instance has been instrumental in almost all of these efforts. As a senator from California, she could be replaced with someone nearly politically identical that didn't support government surveillance.

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

#189

Post by loeg »

palmtree3000 wrote: post #60
ndesaulniers wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another benefit, it sounds like, is that you don't have to pay capital gains on selling those shares. 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 ta…

You indeed don't have to pay long term capital gains tax, although you do have to pay short term capital gains tax.

No? Donations of stock to DAFs are not taxed and the full amount is deducted.

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

#190

Post by maksim-m »

monocasa wrote: post #159
Thorentis wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I assume Google's reports back already. They need that for ML training.

According to Google, Gboard uses Federating Learning to train a model on user data on the local device, so no sensitive data is not sent to the server. Only the gradients are sent and aggregated on the server. https://research.google/pubs/pub47586/
Post reply on HN