I strongly doubt it's anything to do with booby-trapping. The article was less focused on the physical act of data destruction and more the context of destroyin

I strongly doubt it's anything to do with booby-trapping. The article was less focused on the physical act of data destruction and more the context of destroying data related to an investigation, which arguably constitutes Destruction, Alteration, or falsification of records as per https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1519 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1519 I say arguably of course as I doubt that this is a scenario that has really been carefully tested in law, but the article seemed more focused on how such an act would be interpreted by the courts if it really came to it. And the important part of such a situation is mentioned here: "... (if the user gets blamed for what her phone does to a Cellebrite machine, she will be plunged into a world of pain, irrespective of whether she would ultimately be held culpable for the design of an app she had installed on her phone)... " My layperson read of all this situation is that it doesn't really matter whether or not you know at the time of such a file existing whether or not you're under investigation, if the end effect the file will have on a process used by a Government Agency in a legal search is known, the fear seems to be that even if ultimately you end up inculpable, it's a very long and rocky road to get there legally speaking, as the Government will likely not even try to argue about the quality of code or whether it's you or Cellebrite (or whoever) that is responsible, but that you had a file which had a known effect which in turn impeded an investigation. Remember that criminal cases have specific challenges that the prosecution accuses of and that the defendant protects against; if the challenge is that "[you] knowingly put data on your computer which impedes investigations by Agencies of the US Government by means of corrupting data", the mechanism of how the data got corrupted is not nearly as important as the actual act/intention. If Signal really is doing this, I think their intent was trying to undermine this with the random users part (so that users couldn't feasible know if they had a trap or not), but personally, I think this is kind of weak as with the announcement, there's knowledge that an application you have has a non-0 chance of causing such disruption, and probably it's enough to at least waste a lot of your time and money. (Especially if it really did a number on a Cellebrite device that damaged a lot of other investigations...probably they'd go after a person just out of spite at that point.)