MLAT order from Luxembourg for Signal user data

https://signal.org/bigbrother/northern-california-order/

by Sami_Lehtinen • 5 years ago

93 87 5 years ago

signal.org

bsaul6• 5 years ago

my guess is they will soon be rendered illegal. States don't like it when someone repeatedly gives them the finger...

can16358p• 5 years ago

You mean encrypted communications or making order documents public?

bsaul6• 5 years ago

i mean encrypting metadata as well, so that you can't provide security agencies anything at all

rStar4• 5 years ago

totalitarian dictatorial authoritarian states, yes

ben_w3• 5 years ago

Well perhaps, but I get the impression (as one who lives here) that the EU values privacy over free speech, so perhaps not.

DyslexicAtheist3• 5 years ago

in theory yes but in practice your rights to privacy stop the moment you're on the radar of LEA's. not because of the laws but because of companies / vendors over-enthusiastic and pro-active efforts to collaborate.

one of my first jobs working as a dev for what was back then the largest email provider in Germany was a system that would automatically extract all email correspondence from user-accounts that were demanded (via fax) and fax it back to them. we received only a few per week and it was a manual process at LEA's s. there was no law that required this to be automated and we could have done this manually but we wanted it to scale so that we could serve the same answers not per week but per second if we had to (at least that's how I implemented it because I was young, and keen and not thinking). I have no idea how many requests they answer today but if I'd have to guess it would be a lot more because these processes today are also automated at the LEA. It's no longer a deputy that prints it out and manually sends a fax.

also LEO's are just people. there are plenty of cases where they are totally happy to use the system to their advantage, and well beyond making speeding tickets disappear.

andix3• 5 years ago

Let's see. In many countries Signal is now the primary communication tool for politicians. They love to communicate securely, without the risk of getting caught by law enforcement ;)

kypro• 5 years ago

That's easy to solve though. They could easily write exceptions to any anti-encryption bill for public orgs who have access to sensitive information (police, politicians, etc). In fact, I would be shocked if they didn't make exceptions for certain parts of the government.

hansel_der• 5 years ago

In many countries Signal is now the primary communication tool for politicians

citation please

svnee5• 5 years ago

Don’t tell the Luxembourgish government, they still use Whatsapp (seriously) for communication (some also use Signal et al.) but not a majority. And I personally use it amongst other things to communicate with whistleblowers ;)

noduerme3• 5 years ago

up to now, the US has taken a softer approach (unlike Russia or China) of trying to quietly convince companies to set up backdoors. Outright banning E2EE is a losing proposition, since it's fundamentally not possible. Far better to have a root password and corrupt the whole system than to publicly take it down.

bsaul6• 5 years ago

i can see a middle ground with just disabling e2e for metadata, just like whatsapp.

newswasboring• 5 years ago

In my books this is worse. It gives users a false sense of security and allows government to hide it's intensions. The safe face by supporting free speech only in principal. At least with China and my home country India the intensions are clear, you have very few rights.

Edit: changed a word

DyslexicAtheist3• 5 years ago

unlikely because the 0day / offsec market ensures continued access for LEA. OffSec vendors may have contributed more than we think to help silence the discussion about legal backdoors. Personally I prefer this over mandates to key-escrow and legal backdoors.

noduerme3• 5 years ago

> OffSec vendors may have contributed more than we think to help silence the discussion about legal backdoors

Can you explain this further?

INTPenis• 5 years ago

Yeah for those of us who remember it, what Signal is doing now is what TPB were doing many years ago.

Of course TPB were also enabling the sharing of masses of copyrighted material. But what Signal is doing, in the eyes of police and intelligence community, is almost the same.

I honestly see a bleak future where the development of secure applications is forced underground. And the next step would be total control of the internet so no anonymous networks can exist. And after that we'll just use radio, so really there is no way to stop people wanting to be private.

Because the Stasi searched for pirate radio stations with vans.

ben_w3• 5 years ago

Eh, if they do they’ll eventually discover some naughty persons have made a website that looks like a foreign bank right up until you log in with the appropriate username and password, at which point it turns out to be a naughty chat forum.

And no way to break the https encryption in advance without also making all online banking vulnerable to hackers.

Perhaps they’ll try to get around that by van Eck phreaking everyone’s phone/tablet/vr/computer screens. That will explode in the faces of both law enforcement and politicians when the fantasies in table 2 of this paper have official faces attached to them [link is research paper titled “What Exactly Is an Unusual Sexual Fantasy?”]: https://oraprdnt.uqtr.uquebec.ca/pls/public/docs/FWG/GSC/Pub...

(Before anyone thinks of the obvious fantasy on that list “good, I don’t want such people in power!”, the egg will still be very much on the face).

And last I checked, unlawful drug use is sufficiently common[0] that actually trying to enforce it fairly would bankrupt the nation[0], so same applies to other types of naughty.

[0] (in) the UK

underdeserver• 5 years ago

Aside from the header, I don't see anything to do with Luxembourg. Does anyone know?

morsch2• 5 years ago

I also don't know how they know this relates to a request from Luxembourg, but (not being a lawyer) I guess you can at least tell it's from another government since it refers to 18 USC § 3512 which is Foreign requests for assistance in criminal investigations and prosecutions.

svnee5• 5 years ago

As an MP in Luxembourg I asked the gov’ for confirmation and they confirmed that they were at the origin of the request. Currently I’m waiting on more details as to how many requests our tiny nation made to different messenger services abroad.

rvz2• 5 years ago

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.

Does this mean that Signal (and other open-source E2EE apps) is a great hiding place for the 'lost and banned', and 'bad' actors?

EDIT: Judging from the responses, it is admittedly a "Yes" then.

In the case of Signal unfortunately for everyone else, the service is centralised and some governments can and may get the ISPs to block Signal's servers instead.

arianvanp• 5 years ago

It's a great hiding place for actors.

thendrill• 5 years ago

“bad actor" is a very very relative term in this case.....

rStar4• 5 years ago

it means signal might possibly be one of the last services on earth that respects your mfing freedom.

rStar4• 5 years ago

and I for one am thankful

bsaul6• 5 years ago

signal is IMHO the first time in history when people could communicate remotely without gvt being able to spy on the conversation.

New_California2• 5 years ago

This one is honest attempt in decentralization of IM: https://cwtch.im/ - worth supporting with donations because there is no token/ICO, no blockchain, and no bullshit from the author Sarah Jamie Lewis.

rvz2• 5 years ago

because there is no token/ICO, no blockchain, and no bullshit

That is good to hear. Unfortunately for now, there is no iOS app which is a serious limitation in order to get others to move off from the alternatives.

Until then, no thanks and no deal.

tentacleuno• 5 years ago

If I were looking at this from the perspective of the Govt., it would most likely make sense to request data from Signal. There's nothing much to lose, really.

The transparency is rather nice, too. Reminds me of Njalla, but without the children's pictures.

fei6Ij6m• 5 years ago

The order is dated 2020-11-24. The response is dated 2021-09-22. The motion to unseal is dated 2021-10-20.

Is it normal for Signal to have waited 10 months before responding?

Arnt6• 5 years ago

It's very slow, slow enough to suspect some bug. Note that it doesn't say when the order was delivered to Signal or the lawyer at the ACLU.

noduerme3• 5 years ago

I'm not sure how Signal functions internally. Does it act as a server that just facilitates E2EE tunnels between clients? In that case wouldn't they still have metadata of which clients were connecting through the app at a certain time, if not which other clients they were paired with?

bsaul6• 5 years ago

i still don't understand how they can route messages to devices without having some kind of registry as well as leaking the destination out of the encrypted payload..

edit : root -> route :)) talk about a freudian slip :)))

Arnt6• 5 years ago

The verb is route. Rooting a phone... you made me sit up there ;)

They do have a registry, but it's not relevant to this order. When you send me a message, your phone sends Signal my phone number and an encrypted blob. Signal routes that to my phone and the server doesn't keep a long-term record of that. Thus, Signal-the-server has a record for the next many seconds at least containing the destination of a messsage. It does not have my profile name, your profile name or any way to connect your phone number to that message.

Signal running on my phone has enough state concerning you to decrypt the encrypted blob and see that it's from you.

Signal, the organisation, is in control of all the source code and could change the code to gain control of all the information Luxembourg is asking for. But the past is immutable. Noone can go back in time and retroactively store more data. Signal didn't log the destination phone number at the time and so it's not available now, Signal didn't transmit the profile names to the server and so it never arrived and could not be stored.

XorNot• 5 years ago

Signal can just elect not to store that data, because they don't care. Realistically it might be possible to compel them to retain a log which phone numbers communicated with a specific device, but as I understand it after the initial handshake to register your phone number they also don't retain what it actually is - just the hash of it. So it would have to be a demand for forcible cooperation going forwards, since you can't recover data you don't have.

You're never going to make abstract metadata like volume of messages and relationships completely anonymous, but that's essentially an opsec issue which Signal is trying to solve by normalizing it anyway: if all your communications are always encrypted all the time, and you constantly use them, then there's no discontinuity if you go from "I don't like advertisers" too "I am in possession of the panama papers" - it all looks the same.

input_sh• 5 years ago

When a reaches Signal's servers, all Signal knows is the destination and a timestamp. It even hides the sender via a process called sealed sender if you want to look it up.

So all they have is your phone number, date when you've registered, and last time you've used it. If someone took over their servers, all they'd see are encrypted blobs and their destination. They have no reason to keep those blobs after they've been delivered.

This is exactly all the info they've previously reported to the courts. Example: https://signal.org/bigbrother/cd-california-grand-jury/

    Last connection date: 1634169600000 (unix millis)
    Account created: 1606866784432 (unix millis)

0xy4• 5 years ago

You imply metadata like encrypted blobs and destinations isn't valuable to governments and law enforcement. This is very far from the truth.

People are killed over metadata.

An encrypted blob also isn't nothing. Encryption is not a silver bullet. With a stream of encrypted blobs, you can ascertain:

- Connections

- Frequency of communication

- Volume of communication (length of the blobs)

- IP addresses

- Receipt time on the target number

Etc.

usui3• 5 years ago

Signal seems to be a lone island in its dedication to user privacy. Is this naive or an accurate evaluation? Have they done anything recently to signal that these may falter? What is going to suggest they won't resort to rent-seeking or monetizing in the future?

mach1ne• 5 years ago

Very recently they added their first closed-source component to their code, supposedly a spam filter. This sort of went by HN. I can't help but think that the timing with all these requests is rather coincidental.

approxim8ion2• 5 years ago

My understanding is that this component was added to their server code. If their clients are still verifyiably encrypting the content and limiting the metadata for your messages, it should not be much of an issue.

0xy4• 5 years ago

Their server code was closed source for over a year with no explanation, turns out it was to add a shitcoin called "MobileCoin" that Signal's founder has a financial interest in.

Ever since that, I don't think you should consider Signal's server "open source" at all. They've shown they'll conceal, diverge and cover up for their own enrichment. What will they do when they're threatened? Cave.

Klonoar• 5 years ago

It didn't "sort of go by HN", it was on the front page for a bit and had some 97 comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29072031

ComodoHacker2• 5 years ago

There are many smaller islands like Threema, Tox and others. Signal is not a lone one, even if we look away from the continent named Apple.

usui3• 5 years ago

I can't agree with this one. I enjoy Apple products and consider them to be of high quality, but they should not be the star example for user privacy. iCloud backups are turned on by default, which means they have access to the private key, and they considered adding a client-side detection system for "child pornography". From the standpoint of E2EE, enough is enough with the "gray area" in privacy systems. Either you don't fiddle/introspect with the content that goes through your communication medium, or you do.

hippich• 5 years ago

Last time I tried them, they still required phone number? If it is still the case, they did compromise on the users privacy.

usui3• 5 years ago

This is a usability stance. Removing the ability to use phone numbers would have made it harder for users to adopt Signal, and I find it to be a reasonable trade-off. At least right now, the only thing prying eyes can do is know that you use Signal due to the login SMS, or hijack your SMS. We all know about some terrible security practices that phone providers have been doing with phone number swapping by unauthorized parties, but if we can pick non-awful phone providers which at least have password-protected SIM locks on the account, it shouldn't be as viable.

New_California2• 5 years ago

There is more, like very promising https://cwtch.im/

fauigerzigerk3• 5 years ago

Matrix looks the most promising to me. I believe the people behind it are principled (just like I think the people behind Signal are), but the Matrix protocol doesn't require heros. There's no single point of technical or legal failure.

tialaramex4• 5 years ago

the Matrix protocol doesn't require heros

Do you have some examples of the sort of "heroism" you think is involved here?

boondaburrah• 5 years ago

Signal has demonstrated to me that they don't give a shit about privacy, but they care a lot about security. I'll take it, but I wouldn't confuse the two.

d3m0t3p• 5 years ago

do they have your phone number ? if so, the cops just call your operator and have your adress

stabbles• 5 years ago

I've said this before, but

Signal still knows nothing about you

they do have the means to push an app update that uploads decrypted messages somewhere, and I wonder to what extent governments can force them to do so. Signal users should not enable automatic updates, that's for sure.

kovariantenkak• 5 years ago

Signal has access to more data than they would like you to believe. Each account at Signal is identified by a phone number or an UUID. This account also contains a [list of devices](https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server/blob/c21eb6aa5098...). Each of the devices has some uinteresting metadata assigned to it, but more importantly it links to a specific Android or iOS device through the [push token](https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server/blob/c21eb6aa5098...). This gives the authorities a link to an account at Google or Apple which then of course contains much more data.

MLAT order from Luxembourg for Signal user data

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