Quote of the day—Signal

Signal doesn’t have access to your messages; your chat list; your groups; your contacts; your stickers; your profile name or avatar; or even the GIFs you search for. As a result, our response to the subpoena will look familiar. 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
April 27, 2021
Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
[Good to know.

See also here.—Joe]

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7 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Signal

  1. So what are the odds that the Powers That Be will try to charge Signal with conspiracy to commit … something … because they don’t save the data the PTB want? As a means of trying to force them to save said data for next time, perhaps, or to send a message to app developers in general.

    • 100% if the Powers That Be are successful in getting a domestic terrorism bill. Using an Encryption system is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

    • And even worse, what are the odds that the Powers That Be slap a classified Code Word/Need To Know on the requirement?

  2. What are the odds the NSA or some other spook agency LONG AGO found a way to actually obtain the data from Signal and store it……just because the company says and even believes their service is totally anonymous and untrackable does NOT mean that someone hasn’t found a way.

    • Maybe, but that’s a popular rumor used to attempt to discredit good systems. For example, it has been claimed, utterly without foundation, about the famous PGP email encryption program.
      I don’t know Signal and haven’t examined it so I can’t offer a technical judgment. A good way to answer the question you posed is to check if the system Signal implements is open. If the algorithms are standard and the implementation openly visible, then it may well be secure. For example, if it encrypts using OpenSSL, I would have confidence in the encryption simply because that standard has been examined by hundreds of the best people in the world and found to be solid.
      On the other hand, if the algorithms are secret, the default assumption must be that they are defective. For more on that, search for the famous “Crypto Snake Oil FAQ”. Examples abound: early cellular phone encryption systems, DVD encryption, etc. Very, very rarely you see an exception; the only one I know of is the RC4 cipher.

  3. Pingback: Why I use Signal | Captain of a Crew of One

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