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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

#81

Post by flipbrad »

chki wrote: post #63
flipbrad wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the EU, I'm afraid, the answer would be: plenty. Look at French law for instance.

Can you give more specifics? "French law" is quite broad.

Sure!

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000023646013

On the books since 2011. Upheld in a recent decision of France's supreme court despite what some thought to be quite clearly contrary EU caselaw (which takes precedence over national law, roughly speaking) https://www.nextinpact.com/article/45613/comment-conseil-det...

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

#82

Post by davidw »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #70
azinman2 wrote: post #49

It’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.

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…

> What you can't do, is click on a button to spy on people

There's a subpoena in this process that you're glossing over. You can argue that's too easy or too secretive or something, and that's more than fair, but it's not just 'clicking a button'.

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

#83

Post by rdtsc »

Noticed that the last connection time is a date, rounded to the day.

    1634169600000 (unix millis)
    Thursday, October 14, 2021 12:00:00 AM
Well done. I immediately thought that having a millisecond granularity of last connection time could be used to roughly correlate who contacted whom, depending on what the "connected" event is considered.

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

#84

Post by ramsj »

14 wrote: post #32

Last I checked signal still required a phone number to use so it is an instant deal breaker for a lot of people. I have 3 kids I communicate with but they don’t have a cell number just use wifi when they can. If I could use signal with them I would. Instead I use Wire since it seems secure and doesn’t require a phone number. I can only imagine there are lots of other people with kids in my situation.

Threema is another app I've liked. They have a decent transparency report which shows the limited user data they collect/possess. Link: https://threema.ch/en/transparencyreport

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

#85

Post by ARandomerDude »

savant_penguin wrote: post #61
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.

Agreed, except when the government gets to make that subpoena a state secret

With very limited use, even secret subpoenas can be a good thing, for example in a counterintelligence situation where you don't want to tip your hand to a foreign intelligence service.

The problem is abuse of that system.

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

#87

Post by flipbrad »

otterley wrote: post #47
flipbrad wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, not an open question in the UK.

What's the law in the UK, out of curiosity?

Even assuming we're just talking about traffic data rather than content of communications:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2016/25/section/87/enac...

Ctrl+f for "generation"

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

#88

Post by surge »

davidw wrote: post #82
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #70

Earlier 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…

> What you can't do, is click on a button to spy on people There's a subpoena in this process that you're glossing over. You can argue that's too easy or too secretive or something, and that's more than fair, but it's not just 'clicking a button'.

Sub poena is basically a rubber stamp after filling out a form. Often done in secret with the barest of oversight. A warrant requires a bit more justification at least.

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

#89

Post by hackflip »

azinman2 wrote: post #49

It’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.

What is the criminals are the authorities?

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

#90

Post by post_below »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #85
savant_penguin wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, except when the government gets to make that subpoena a state secret

With very limited use, even secret subpoenas can be a good thing, for example in a counterintelligence situation where you don't want to tip your hand to a foreign intelligence service. The problem is abuse of that system.

Abuse of that system being a when, not if, scenario.
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