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

https://signal.org/bigbrother/central-california-grand-jury/

by missinglink12 • 5 years ago

538 219 5 years ago

sneak2• 5 years ago

Page 8 of that subpoena says the document files produced must have the extension "*.TIF". (note asterisk)

I wonder how they'd like it if you sent them files literally named

    FILE001.PAGE001.*.TIF

(the rest of the specified file format structure notwithstanding)

It's very important to follow the instructions exactly when you are legally compelled to do something!

KMag• 5 years ago

Q: "Why did you send us BPGs[0] named .TIF?"

A: "Because you specified an extension, not a file format."

[0]https://bellard.org/bpg/

admissionsguy• 5 years ago

That will be 30 days in county jail, adios.

sneak2• 5 years ago

Surprisingly, the subpoena does specify the file format, including the compression, rather precisely.

drivingmenuts• 5 years ago

It’s interesting how the government gets to demand the evidence in a very specific format, thereby offloading the work the government should be doing onto someone else, apparently without recompense.

spacemanmatt• 5 years ago

You can be assured that any request for bulk data the government actually fulfills will be available by fax, smoke signal, and cuneiform.

andix2• 5 years ago

Let's see if they try to search the Signal servers for any evidence. And if there is really no information stored.

Or if that will disrupt Signal services. The central, non-distributed architecture is always a big concern against Signal.

movedx2• 5 years ago

Agreed. I really wish they would go decentralised. If they did, I'd order up my 1gbit/1gbit dedicated link at the office and offer it up immediately.

zdkl• 5 years ago

If you want something decentralised what's wrong with doing the same with Tor and/or Matrix?

Phenix88be• 5 years ago

I used to think the same, but I changed my mind after this talk : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8

There is a lot of very good point in this talk by Moxie, it's a bit long, but worth it.

swiley2• 5 years ago

Even if it's decentralized there's only one client and they can always push updates to male it send keys/messages back for targeted users.

Smartphones in their current form cannot have secure messaging.

hans1729• 5 years ago

Smartphones in their current form cannot have secure messaging.

What about self-hosted matrix/element, used from the browser?

tallanvor• 5 years ago

Signal can stop you from using the service until you update, but they can't force you to update their app.

chippiewill• 5 years ago

Even if it's decentralized there's only one client and they can always push updates to male it send keys/messages back for targeted users.

The clients are open source, presumably you can compile and install the client from source to avoid a bad update being pushed.

capableweb4• 5 years ago

Surprisingly, the response from the Signal team hints that Signal is sometimes P2P. This is the first time I hear about this, what is it referring to exactly? I, like you, thought Signal was 100% centralized.

[...] because the data is transmitted peer-to-peer or relayed through a third-party server [...]

Attachment A, Section 2C

giords• 5 years ago

I believe that voice and video calls work using WebRTC, which is a P2P technology

wolverine8763• 5 years ago

There's a setting in Signal where you can force it to always (or never?) use P2P.

airhead969• 5 years ago

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.

sicco• 5 years ago

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

goodpoint• 5 years ago

Reminder: 1) Signal, Matrix, XMPP and so on do not protect you from timing correlation especially between users connecting to the same server.

2) The social connection graph is easy to extract when people communicate often

3) The more data is captured, the more likely it is to find suspicious coincidences that are actually false positives

4) Not everybody lives in a healthy and safe society

Please consider recommending Briar or similar onion-routed messengers instead of Signal, Matrix, XMPP

ransom1538• 5 years ago

Eh. I have worked with US investigators quite a few times. They really try to work with you. If you don't have the information and you tell them you don't have the information - they pretty much drop it. FBI/local police are not interested in pulling servers and doing forensics. This isn't what their prosecutors want. Prosecutors want: "Hey, give me all data you have for IP address X." If you honestly can explain to them you don't have it -- they just drop it move on to easier cases IMHO.

willvarfar• 5 years ago

So as I type this, Signal have two stories in top-10 on HN: more coverage of Signal's Cellebrite Hack, and this.

Are they connected?

Signal gets this subpoena on the 29th March, and the reply by ACLU is on the 12th April.

Signal's founder and CEO, Moxie Marlinspike, hacked Cellebrite and the story surfaced this week.

Was it retaliation? Was it just because the subpoena made him wonder? Or is there something else causing Moxie to lash out at Cellebrite about now? Or was it all chance?

input_sh2• 5 years ago

The reason they've mentioned "first half" of 2016 is because this isn't first such subpoena. See: https://signal.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand-jury/

Doubtful there's any connection between the two.

jinzo• 5 years ago

Cellebrite made a splash some time ago that their tools can extract Signal messages from the (unlocked?) devices. The claim was " Cellebrite can now break into Signal, an encrypted app considered safe from external snooping, it claimed." [1] And I guess that did not sit too well with Moxie :)

[1] https://securityboulevard.com/2020/12/signal-app-crypto-crac...

m4lvin• 5 years ago

Funny that they give all information they have about these accounts not just to the court, but even make it public. Page 3 of the response PDF shows the registration and last connection time stamps (all of which are between April and December 2020).

Is this an elegant way to notify those six users?

input_sh2• 5 years ago

I don't think so. I've tried a few last connection dates and they're all over 6 months in the past. Odds are they're burner numbers based on that alone.

For example, last number last connected on Sep 13, 2020 (they're just dates, no time info stored), while the account was created on July 7th, 2020 at 16:15:37. Knowing the number's without Internet access for over half a year, person in question is probably unable to compare the creation date and time to the SMS received from Signal.

movedx2• 5 years ago

This sort of subpoena clearly shows one of two things: 1. the government/law enforcement really don't have any idea how technology works; 2. they don't care and they're just trying their luck anyway.

Either or it shows how tone deaf the state is when it comes to modern technologies.

LinuxBender• 5 years ago

I can rule out number 1 for you. I've had to assist the FBI many times and everyone I interacted with was incredibly technical, more than I ever expected. They are very under-staffed however.

djoldman3• 5 years ago

I am not a lawyer.

The lawyers at DOJ know what they are doing (notwithstanding the history or fact that signal will respond with little information): The subpoena has a request for interstate wire to help them quash future motions to dismiss on jurisdictional grounds.

Whatever statute they're looking to charge will have an element of federal jurisdiction attached and interstate wire works great even if there are other ways. It's easy to ask, so they'll ask for it all.

mdeck_• 5 years ago

I am a lawyer, and you’re correct. It’s typically called a “jurisdictional hook.” In certain regards the US Constitution limits the U.S. Congress’s ability to legislate to issues that touch on “interstate commerce.” If it all happens within Montana’s borders, that’s typically for Montana to handle in its own state legislature. So, for the DOJ to investigate something, they have to then satisfy whatever jurisdictional hook that the Congress put in the law, which in turn makes the law constitutional (in the sense of: within the Congress’s jurisdiction to legislate about). Here, the Congress will have required a proof of “use of interstate wires” (or something to that effect).

djoldman3• 5 years ago

I'm less certain of the following but as I understand it: if the event in question involves telephone/fiber lines or airwaves, it's usually a shoe-in for Fed jurisdiction anyway because those are generally regulated by some Fed agency and/or travel at some point through Fed-owned, regulated, or operated assets.

Vinnl2• 5 years ago

For their first subpoena [1], they said:

It originally included a broad gag order that would have prevented us from publishing this notice, but the ACLU represented us in quickly and successfully securing our ability to publish the transcripts below.

This subpoena says:

you are asked not to disclose the existence of nature of the subpoena

But the post doesn't mention that at all. I wonder how much effort they had to spend, if any, to be able to publish this this time.

[1] https://signal.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand-jury/

laurencei• 5 years ago

Does the phrase "you are asked" have a legal bearing though? is it something they can just choose to not follow, since they were not "told" or "instructed"?

underdeserver• 5 years ago

Given that the subpoena itself contains language such as "YOU ARE COMMANDED" (sic), probably not, but I imagine Moxie asked the ACLU lawyers before making it public.

alias_neo2• 5 years ago

Given that the following sentence says "If you nonetheless plan to disclose the existence or nature of the subpoena, please contact the Special Agent identified above first".

I suspect it might not. I don't know why this additional information wasn't quoted by the parent comment.

elliekelly• 5 years ago

I don’t have any experience with Homeland Security investigations but I know when the SEC begins major investigations they’ll often request the subject of the investigation voluntarily waive attorney-client privilege. Who on earth would do that? Well, just about everyone. Of course they can’t force a waiver of privilege but the implication is that things will go much better for you if you do. The investigation (and subsequent punishment) will be much less painful for you. I suspect there’s a similar implication lurking behind this polite ask as well.

alkonaut2• 5 years ago

But the post doesn't mention that at all. I wonder how much effort they had to spend, if any, to be able to publish this this time.

Indefinite gag orders aren't a good thing, but if there is an investigation and knowledge of that investigation can interfere with it then I can see why they would be "asked" not to publish it.

These asks should have time limits though, just like security disclosure. The only valid reason to keep it under covers would be just that: because it could interfere with an ongoing investigation.

Asking to not disclose inquiries while an investigation is ongoing, or "withing 12 months due to an ongoing criminal investigation" would have better optics.

INTPenis2• 5 years ago

OT and tinfoil hat on; there was a strange event last week with users of Signal on the Telia ISP.[1]

For about 24 hours no messages could be sent, resulting in a 401 unauthorized error from the server side.

Telia is the former state-owned Swedish ISP that is now only half state-owned I believe.

They have a bad rep already for sending out extortion letters to torrent users and are almost assumed to be monitoring all user traffic for the police.

No explanation of the event has been provided by anyone. Users have done some basic troubleshooting but couldn't really establish much. I personally would love to see what those 401 errors looked like on the Signal server side. What exactly were these clients sending that was unauthorized on the server side? I guess we'll never know, hopefully it wasn't even stored.

1. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/5202

zibzab• 5 years ago

They have a bad rep already for sending out extortion letters to torrent users

That's almost never the ISPs doing, they are being strong armed by IP owners.

exmadscientist• 5 years ago

Sure, but some ISPs get strong-armed while others get... weak-armed. (And that's being generous to many of them.)

tialaramex6• 5 years ago

As one of the replies in that thread you linked explains, this is TLS encrypted traffic, so Telia can't really do anything to influence what happens here. They don't get to see what the traffic means, and if they change any of it then the connection aborts, which doesn't result in a 401 error it just hangs up abruptly - that's how TLS is designed to work.

It is entirely possible that somebody at Signal fat-fingered an IP address block, e.g. some kiddie is spewing 10Gb/s of traffic from 10.2/16 to Signal, but a Signal person blocks 10.20/16 [addresses example only] and only a week later when investigating "Why are we still eating 10Gb/s of spew?" do they realise they typo'd the number.

upofadown2• 5 years ago

I could not find the reference to TLS in the replies. Generally Signal does not use TLS for their messaging system, it is instead something home brewed.

INTPenis2• 5 years ago

Yeah that makes a lot more sense, I was so wrapped up in tinfoil I didn't even think about the TLS. Thanks.

baybal2• 5 years ago

What investigation it is for?

mike_d2• 5 years ago

The subpoena is from Homeland Security Investigations at LAX airport.

They deal specifically with crimes that involve international transport. So this is human trafficking, drug smuggling, money mules, etc.

To be honest the rest of it is just standard "we have some phone numbers" boilerplate. Same thing was probably sent to Facebook, Twitter, etc. with the hopes that someone was dumb enough to login and check their messages from a burner phone.

Edit: Rereading it, this is a grand jury. They likely already know the who, what, why, and how. Signal's response will go to support other evidence that they may have recovered from cell phones or cell network. Grand juries historically result in a 95%+ chance of indictment so this isn't a fishing expedition.

roflc0ptic• 5 years ago

The structure of grand juries makes it so that the defense is unable to mount a defense. The fact that grand juries often result in indictment has vanishing little relevance for whether or not it’s a fishing expedition. Further, no one is saying it is a fishing expedition. It’s a request for information that Signal isn’t designed to be able to answer.

You’re also just speculating about the nature of the crime, but saying it confidently, like, oh, this is definitely true. You don’t know.

tialaramex6• 5 years ago

Grand Juries are a really weird American thing†. The Grand Jury is entirely dependant on the prosecutor for guidance, so as an outsider it appears to me that their real purpose is to enable politically appointed prosecutors to pretend this anonymous "Grand jury" decided not to prosecute somebody when in reality what happened is that the prosecutor didn't want to. So now it's not the prosecutor's fault an obviously guilty person walked free, and yet conveniently they don't need to prosecute anybody they don't want to.

† Americans didn't invent them, but they did keep them after everybody else went "Wait, this is a terrible idea" and abolished the Grand Jury.

mike_d2• 5 years ago

You’re also just speculating about the nature of the crime, but saying it confidently, like, oh, this is definitely true. You don’t know.

HSI is a fairly narrowly scoped law enforcement agency. I've dealt with multiple agents over there, and at one point considered joining when I wanted to get out of computers. But feel free to call the press office and ask if you don't want to believe a random on the internet.

Khaine• 5 years ago

There’s a facetious saying in legal circles about the ease with which prosecutors can secure indictments in grand jury cases: You can get a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.”

The legal aphorism has long been attributed to Sol Wachtler, former chief judge of New York’s Court of Appeals, based on a piece that appeared in the New York Daily News in January 1985. Mr. Wachtler told the paper that the state should scrap the grand jury system for bringing criminal indictments. The piece summarized his view, with brief quotes: “district attorneys now have so much influence on grand juries that ‘by and large’ they could get them to ‘indict a ham sandwich.’”

Mr. Wachtler became even more firmly linked to the saying two years later, when Tom Wolfe, a classmate of the judge at Washington and Lee University, credited him with the “ham sandwich” line in “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”

From https://www.wsj.com/articles/indict-a-ham-sandwich-remains-o....

I remember hearing it on Law and Order!

dharmab4• 5 years ago

I served on a grand jury and remember one case that I thought was very shaky. We only passed that by around 85% rather than our usual 100%.

Loughla• 5 years ago

Grand juries historically result in a 95%+ chance of indictment

Is this automatically assumed to be a good thing? If so, why?

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 5 years ago

They deal specifically with crimes that involve international transport. So this is human trafficking, drug smuggling, money mules, etc.

So Signal is being used for human trafficking? And they are deliberately making it easy to do that kind of activity on Signal without law enforcement knowing? Sounds like the app stores should ban them and AWS should kick them off.

I disagree with the above sentiment, but I think end to end encryption apps will be treated like that in the near future.

vineyardmike4• 5 years ago

Nah. Apple likes privacy and encryption (they claim) so it’s have a hard time justifying that.

Also the founder of signal is very well connected to the Silicon Valley who’s who.

bberenberg2• 5 years ago

Having sat on a grand jury, the 95% is because it's a rigged system. The DA has to convinces 50% of the people that there is a 50% chance that their one sided story is possibly true. This is a lower bar than individuals are held to at cocktail parties.

refurb• 5 years ago

So it may not be great, but what’s the alternative? The prosecutor decides independently when to bring charges? Is that better? It just seems to skip a step.

dharmab4• 5 years ago

Having served on a grand jury, one of the first things we did was delegate the management of documents (including subpoenas) to the court staff. We didn't issue our own subpoenas; that would have been thousands of documents we didn't have the time to manage.

Grand juries historically result in a 95%+ chance of indictment so this isn't a fishing expedition.

There were cases presented to us which did not result in any indictment vote as new information was discovered or persons involved made deals with the prosecutors. The prosecutors didn't have us vote on things they weren't sure about, but that doesn't mean they never made mistakes.

Semaphor• 5 years ago

The subpoena requested a wide variety of information that fell into this nonexistent category, including the addresses of the users, their correspondence, and the name associated with each account.

And in other jurisdictions, only the correspondence would be inaccessible. Furthermore, there would be no need to contact Signal because you can get that information just from their phone number.

Just in case anyone is still wondering why there are users who still complain about Signal linking accounts to phone numbers.

danpalmer• 5 years ago

Interesting that they provide last login dates as Unix milliseconds, but rounded to day boundaries (each of these is at midnight UTC). I'd assume that's what they store, which is good, but it's odd that they provide the data with such unnecessary precision if so.

I wondered originally if this would help disambiguate accounts, perhaps if two numbers last logged in at the same timestamp one could guess that they were on the same device or something, but this doesn't look possible.

timmattison• 5 years ago

I’d guess that’s just how it’s stored and they’re not going to go through any additional effort to make it look nice for a request like this.

psanford2• 5 years ago

The source code for storing the last login timestamp is here: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server/blob/master/servi...

rmac• 5 years ago

"Upon information and belief, these servers are physically located in Virginia."

Such strange and probably necessary legal language...

1_player• 5 years ago

"AWS told us the servers are in Virginia, but don't quote me on that. Might be Virginia, Queensland, for all I know."

ysnp• 5 years ago

Something I am not sure about as a layman: What is the likelihood that the documents Signal are allowed to publish, concerning subpoenas, are an accurate account of all the information they can provide? Could Homeland Security/FBI compel them to lie in the evidence they have produced?

In [1], Signal mention that traffic correlation via timing attacks and IP addresses are a work-in-progress as far as their metadata protection goes. They also claim that they do not store IP addresses, or at least they are not set up to do so. I guess they can be forced to record some of these, if need be.

I am not deeply concerned about the metadata Signal could possibly collect if compelled to (although it is unclear what exactly they can collect) because it is likely best-in-class among encrypted messengers anyway. I suppose it is likely that even if Signal were forced to lie or undergo a gag, the chance of whistle-blowing would be much higher given that they are a donations based nonprofit that probably employ more young-ish people with strong principles, as opposed to employees who need a stable job and have families to look after.

[1] https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/

thecrash2• 5 years ago

My rough understanding is that in the US the State can compel silence but not compel speech. Warrant canaries take this reasoning to an untested extreme, but it seems safe to assume that ordering Signal to tell elaborate lies about its subpoena responses would not fly in court.

auiya• 5 years ago

It's unlikely that prosecutors don't realize how Signal works. It's more likely they assume that, much like the rest of the tech world, there has been an increase in data collection efforts and they want to test the waters again to confirm/deny this data is available via Signal internals. Subpoenas are the only mechanism by which they're able to do so. That Signal are able to pivot to the media and say "yup, still court-tested, still privacy-focused" is a good thing for Signal. No need for the derisive tone I don't think.

cptskippy2• 5 years ago

It's unlikely that prosecutors don't realize how Signal works.

Why would you expect them to understand how Signal works? A lawyer does not and cannot become a subject matter expert for every aspect of a case they undertake.

A lawyer's job is to investigate every possible avenue for evidence to support their case. They're going to ask Signal for everything imaginable and have legal recourse if they discover at a later date that Signal withheld information.

A lawyer with a complete understanding of how Signal works and intimate knowledge of it would still send the same subpoena and expect the same response. They would never say "Oh Signal? That's a dead end, don't bother."

merpnderp• 5 years ago

Because a prosecutor calls up the IT crime lab and asks for the rundown. And since they have massive budgets, there actually is a well trained head of the IT crime lab who is perfectly capable of understanding and explaining (to a jury) how Signal works.

xeromal• 5 years ago

They're just going to call up an expert like they do with every industry.

tekknik4• 5 years ago

Why would you expect them to understand how Signal works? A lawyer does not and cannot become a subject matter expert for every aspect of a case they undertake.

I really hope the lawyer I’m hiring is at least a subject matter expert on the specific laws around the subject. Then a simple google search would explain how this data isn’t available.

infogulch• 5 years ago

If I may restate this slightly:

Subpoenas are the only mechanism by which prosecutors are able to test the waters to confirm/deny whether they can demand production of this data

I think many people fail to appreciate the importance of setting a precedent in the courts. Maybe this is because our legislators have been shirking responsibility for decades and pushing what should be their work off onto the executive and judicial branches, but regardless this is where we are today: If a demand like this is not challenged in court then nobody knows whether it's legal or not. *This is the process by which we learn whether Signal's implementation is allowed in our country.* It may seem clear to you what the right answer should be, but until its tested it's not clear to our government.

billytetrud2• 5 years ago

This is the problem with the common law system. It's a haphazard set of poking and prodding where written law is less than half the story. We really need to switch to a civil law system in this country.

md_4• 5 years ago

This doesn’t make any sense to me.

There’s no precedential issue here. Law enforcement can and routinely do demand such data, and in the case of other services they receive it. The only news here is that Signal can’t produce much of it because they don’t have it.

Signal is in fact complying with the subpoena. They’re not challenging anything in court.

heavyset_go2• 5 years ago

Or the metadata is enough when it comes to evidence. "Person X added person Y on Signal", in context with other evidence, might be all they're looking for.

Hnrobert42• 5 years ago

That metadata is not available, though.

antman• 5 years ago

Also it is an opportunity to test whether Signal's persistence on registering only with a phone number was a good idea or not, considering that it is mandatory in many countries to register with your ID.

cryptonector• 5 years ago

But phone numbers require ID to obtain, so indirectly Signal has not skirted that requirement.

bhalina• 5 years ago

I tip my hat to whoever wrote this

supergirl• 5 years ago

why do they write so amateurish sounding blog posts? 50% of the post is not relevant to the story. they are not making a good image for signal with these posts.

motohagiography3• 5 years ago

It's probably unwise to think prosecutors and federal agents are stupid. They were in the 1990s crypto wars, but not now. What we tend to perceive as 'stupid' is in reality, 'powerful.' They don't need to explain themselves, because they put the onus of compliance on you.

Gaming out the subpoena, Signal does not have this user information because it does not exist, but it does have server locations, 3rd party service providers relationships, and staff who can all be dragged into the process and system, where they can be charged with other arbitrary process crimes to put pressure on them.

It's a mistake to interpret any official action as a serial, single point transactional request. Like mice, if you think you see one, you have, and it's guaranteed there are many more behind it. Given where they have used the action to draw your attention, where in relief is the second part of the pinch or funnel they are creating?

If the legal system wants to destroy you, they can and do. Signal has antagonized them, and the current political climate is all about getting rid of any resistance to official powers and their unofficial private arms. Politically, there is ample incentive to take out Signal and cause users to switch to more amenable apps from friendly platform companies. They may even be able to compel friendly app stores to patch apps before they are distributed.

To me, this subpoena looks like the Cellebrite takedown was analogous to injuring a cop, where the response will likely be disproportionate and even extra-legal, because it is about maintaining public perception and belief.

rocqua• 5 years ago

The subpoena is dated 29 march. That puts it before the celebrite blog. Hence, it cannot be a response to that blog.

motohagiography3• 5 years ago

Fair and astute observation, and it implies prosecutors have been rounding on Signal for months at least before the Cellebrite blog post as well. However, it also means there was already a snare set for them before the post. I would still not underestimate what these people are capable of. If they want to get you, they will find a way to get you.

Mc_Big_G• 5 years ago

I'm glad Signal doesn't have this defeatist attitude.

Sleepytime• 5 years ago

They may even be able to compel friendly app stores to patch apps before they are distributed.

Google's apk signing changes comes to mind.

captainmuon• 5 years ago

If I were really concerned about my users' rights as Moxie and Signal are, I would probably put something into my bylaws that immediately dissolves the company the second we were compelled to act against our convictions. (Sidenote: can you somehow legally destroy non-material property?)

I know they are very much against decentralisation (technially), but in order to keep the service going even in that case it would probably make sense to create dozens or hundreds of legal entities. I know it sounds like a joke, but I know for sure in real estate or meatpacking businesses you have people register companies like "Joes Sausages #1", "Joes Sausages #2", ... "#400" - mainly to get around labor laws but also to make it complicated to determine ownership.

And don't underestimate how utterly dependent our governments are on the online industries - it is todays equivalent of the railroad, and getting control of the railroads was one of the important milestones in the october revolution.

Long story short, I don't think it is quite so one-sided, and I'm going to grab some popcorn...

md_4• 5 years ago

This is one of those posts that sounds truthy because it makes a bunch of broad assertions. ;)

Legal systems are peopled by people. Just like other systems. Unlike many other systems, the American legal system is in fact highly distributed—so it's hard to say things like "The System is out to destroy you"; individual agents of that "system" might have different, misaligned, or antagonistic goals.

Much of this is by design.

Of course, even when not by design, the local, state, and federal agencies, elected officials, and judiciaries which make up "the government" comprise a massive, federated, distributed organization, far more complex, and far less centrally administered, than the most chaotic FAANG company.

So if you think Microsoft can't turn their product strategy on a dime, well, the US government isn't capable of reacting to the Cellebrite blog post this quickly (even if this subpoena didn't precede that post, as someone else pointed out).

(As an aside, while I'm not a lawyer, the question on "interstate wiring" seems rather obviously to suggest that the investigators are pursuing a theory of federal criminal charges that require the messaging to cross state lines. Getting Signal to say "yes, this is interstate" might just be something they need to convince a grand jury the theory applies.)

true_religion• 5 years ago

Signal seems secure from the outside, but is it? A judge won't simply take their word for it that they don't have the data, they'll make the order and see if anything turns up.

What if there's a misconfigured logging server that has information that can be used to identify users? Well then that's now going to be given to the government and if Signal tries to turn it off they'll be liable for destruction of evidence.

The actual employees of Signal know internal details of if something is poorly implemented and leaks useful information or not. If the government rattles the cage hard enough, they think they might find someone within it that will give up that information.

motohagiography3• 5 years ago

A semantic argument about the scope of a synecdoche doesn't address the substance of whether Signal should underestimate the intent and consequences of a clumsy looking subpoena. Partisan and other exceedingly bad actors in a system necessarily have even better special protections than good ones, because they're the ones a system has to defend to defend the legitimacy of itself. Ask any union or profession that behaves like one. Signal has antagonized prosecutors as a class, and it's reasonable to expect some outwardly irrational behaviour from some individuals. They've hit the hornets nest.

Judging by how the the crypto wars played out the last few times, the "Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse" will be trotted out again soon, and probably with the addition of a new predictable character trope.

On a very macro level, tech humiliates intellectuals, politicians and other courtiers, or those who aspire to be them, and this motive is what makes forecasting a crackdown sparked by something like the Cellebrite pillorying seem reasonable.

tekknik4• 5 years ago

so it's hard to say things like "The System is out to destroy you";

How do you explain the 9th circuit court and their decisions around gun control while being scolded by SCOTUS for not following proper process? The legal system is highly politicized these days, and if your not on the “correct” side, it most definitely is out to get you. California turned a bunch of law abiding citizens into felons overnight after abiding by a law written by said government.

vineyardmike4• 5 years ago

What if the legal system doesn’t want to destroy them and this was simply a request to gather chat logs in some other case?

What if there is no conspiracy and this is basically marketing for signal to say “look. We have no data to share. Take our word for it under threat of perjury”

dheera4• 5 years ago

To Mark Zuckerberg: "So, how do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?"

To George Floyd witness: "So you had something called a mobile device right? And a mobile device is capable of taking pictures right? And you used the mobile device to use that capability right? And your eyes were able to see things besides the phone right?"

No shit Sherlock, have you never used Facebook and seen the glaring ads? A 15-year old could figure that out. Oh and yeah phones take pictures and people have eyes that can move. Just play the damn video. Yes, play the video, not "publish the exhibit". They really do sound pretty stupid to me.

salawat2• 5 years ago

Old prosecutor's/attorney's trick. Never ask a question you don't already know the answer to. You're there to tease out the record in your favor, and try to control the narrative through leading questions.

The legal system is not about truth. It's about corraling 12 fish out of water to your way of seeing things. Throw the judges/lawyers a curveball with something like jury nullification and see how quick things get nasty.

mdavis6890• 5 years ago

This is scary, intentional bullying. It costs the govt none of their own money (they have unlimited taxpayer money) to launch these attacks, but it costs Signal or other organizations a lot of their own money to defend against them.

It will continue until Signal agrees to become part of the surveillance state or goes broke and goes away.

panzagl• 5 years ago

You have an overly simplistic view of how government works.

vineyardmike4• 5 years ago

Maybe a prosecutor wants to actually gather evidence on a crime? And it’s not a giant conspiracy against signal.

hedora• 5 years ago

I was wondering if they could get in trouble for publishing the account creation times. In theory, the account holders in question kept track of the time they created these accounts, and now know about the subpoena.

The cover letter from DHS says they need to warn the agent before disclosure. Presumably they did that.

t0mas882• 5 years ago

They are "requested to [..] please" which is very different from the way the rest of the order is written. So it's fair to assume they can decide for themselves whether they want to contact the agent or not.

wolverine8763• 5 years ago

While I generally support Signal's mission, let's not get too taken in by their own PR and its triumphal tone, however satisfying it may be to thumb one's nose at the powerful. (People tend to trust the PR they like and distrust PR they don't like - let's think critically about of all of it.)

Based only on this post and the Cellebrite hack, Signal appears overconfident, taken with their own press clippings, and making enemies. That's not behavior that leads to good security: Paranoid, worried about the next vulnerability, and utilizing excellent risk management to prevent conflict are what I would look for. How does it help their millions of users when Signal provokes a leading forensics firm and the U.S. DoJ?

Could you imagine a security team at a company doing this, making problems for the company? It would be absurd. Maybe Signal feels they need the publicity.

ygjb2• 5 years ago

Several security teams do this. Project Zero and it's various researcher have been thumbing their noses at software companies for a long time.

The Cellebrite hack is not a shocking thing, similar demonstrations have been done for other digital forensics, IDS/IPS systems, and others over the last 20 years (longer?).

This notion that directly, and clearly calling out your adversaries deficiencies is unprofessional or a risk is kind of asinine, whether it's another business like Cellebrite, or ongoing government overreach in support of mass surveillance, or specific cases of investigation.

Failing to call them out leaves room for to imply agreement with their tactics and practices.

ygjb2• 5 years ago

That said, the Cellebrite hack scratched an old-school itch that hasn't been in awhile in a time when in person security cons where some of those demos happen haven't been happening :)

wolverine8763• 5 years ago

Project Zero tries to improve security for the public and in ways that directly or indirectly affect Google, as do many other hackers, by informing the public of risks and by pressuring developers to be more diligent and to fix specific vulnerabilities.

I don't see Signal's recent blog post as trying to pressure Cellebrite to improve their security. And the fact that other people do something isn't evidence of good judgment - other people can be stupid, and your circumstances are your own. Moxy doesn't work for possibly the most well-resourced security organization in the world (maybe outside the NSA), and he's not some independent hacker: he has a company, a product, and the privacy of millions of people that he has taken responsibility for - it's like having kids: you don't get to think of just yourself anymore, ever.

asinine

At least you take your own advice.

jedberg• 5 years ago

My fear with Signal being so giddy about what they don't have is that it will convince Congress to make a law forcing them to collect the data they don't have, the laws of math be damned.

I worry that Congress with just make them liable if they are requested to produce location data and are unable to do so, for example.

Lendal• 5 years ago

As a Signal user it does not make me happy either that they seem to enjoy thwarting law enforcement for its own sake. I'm not a criminal. I just enjoy privacy and good software. I don't enjoy thumbing my nose at the justice department when they're just trying to do their job protecting citizens from criminals.

Signal, just follow the law and quit acting so happy whenever your software helps a criminal get away with criming. It's not a good look.

spurgu2• 5 years ago

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.

eat_veggies• 5 years ago

Signal is complying with the law in this case, and the lack of information in their response is not "thwarting law enforcement for its own sake" but the entire purpose of end-to-end encryption.

Software that allows the possibility of cops spying on you is antithetical to "privacy and good software"

stjohnswarts5• 5 years ago

The problem is prosecuters have a history of seeing just how much they can get away with (just like cops, except they have the power to shoot you in the face). Your attitude is a bad one, because "they're just trying to do their jobs" has been used for centuries to advocate for the government to take more and more freedom away from citizens because it "makes their policing powers easier". I'm sure the Stasi liked it that their police powers were quite ample, but it doesn't make it right.

AlexCoventry• 5 years ago

Couldn't they provide someone's contract info, by using an SGX vulnerability?

daneel_w• 5 years ago

"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 where is the phone number (or its hash) associated with the account stored in order to facilitate the lock?

upofadown2• 5 years ago

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.

stjohnswarts5• 5 years ago

All I can say is fuck the grand jury of the Central District of California. They'll just have to get a warrant for the device and try to convince the person to give up the password to the device. That's how these things work.

ping_pong• 5 years ago

Stuff like this is so powerful, it really makes me trust Signal. It's the same reason why I use Apple, because they fought the government in court. I'm not sure how much I still trust them, but it's more than I would Google/Android.

theamk• 5 years ago

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.

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

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