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While I applaud Signal's response I expect this entire event (subpoena and response) will be provided as one of the exhibits to congress by the Department of Ju
by ChuckMcM 5y ago
While I applaud Signal's response I expect this entire event (subpoena and response) will be provided as one of the exhibits to congress by the Department of Justice to justify their request that it be unlawful to provide such services. The DoJ will say, "See, here is this horrible crime we are investigating and because this company chose to make it impossible for law enforcement, with a warrant and a subpoena to get it, the criminal is going to go unpunished and that will be on you because you refused to mandate lawful access to communications."
The Congressional response should be, "Do you have no other way of investigating these criminals?" "Could you not put an officer out to surveille them?", "Have you not seen the misuse that law enforcement has engaged in, with such capabilities? From petty revenge to stalking lovers who rejected them. Will you consent to mandatory surveillance of all law enforcement officers that is recorded and stored in a civil controlled repository so that officer conduct may be reviewed at any time?"
They won't say that of course. But they should.
- zanethomas 5y agoWhen privacy is outlawed only outlaws will have privacy.
- meowface 5y ago>Will you consent to mandatory surveillance of all law enforcement officers that is recorded and stored in a civil controlled repository so that officer conduct may be reviewed at any time? I think this should be implemented regardless. But the danger is they can easily say "sure; your turn". Some in law enforcement may even genuinely want to do that for its own sake. I think that's a totally orthogonal thing to violating citizens' privacy and shouldn't be considered as leverage or a counterargument.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- arthur_sav 5y agoNothing any company can do about that. Spying programs and laws will only worsen unless people really voice their concerns and elect the right people.
- craftinator 5y ago> Spying programs and laws will only worsen unless people really voice their concerns and elect the right people. I very much suspect that who is elected has nearly zero effect on spying programs.
- majormajor 5y agoI'm not sure which was intended, but I think this is much more accurate as a cynical comment on human nature than some comment on "shadow government/deep state" type stuff.
- ATsch 5y agoAs defines so much of society and what people claim is "human nature", there is no need for shadow governments or deep states when you have power structures and incentives. Those scale, conspiracies don't.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- singron 5y agoThis is definitely not true. Dianne Feinstein for instance has been instrumental in almost all of these efforts. As a senator from California, she could be replaced with someone nearly politically identical that didn't support government surveillance.
- jrootabega 5y agoWhat they're saying is that those who get elected are forced to support government surveillance.
- ekianjo 5y agowho you are before you get elected and after are not the same. never forget that.
- swiley 5y agoMaking this unlawful would violate the constitution. People are already upset at the Federal Government, now isn't the time for more bullshit.
- not2b 5y agoMaking it unlawful to operate this kind of service would be a very bad idea, but it's far from clear that it's unconstitutional, and I would expect courts to rule otherwise if Congress decides to impose more logging requirements.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- majormajor 5y agoThe single most clear political lesson of the past decade is that using power, even blatantly cynically, when you have it, won't produce much of a backlash. Your fans will just wait until the "other team" does it to complain. And that's for hyper-partisan issues! I'm not sure there's any truly influential political group that would strongly oppose this. Thinking it's just the politicians who are unaware and/or disagree with the tech-minded is a mistake. The populace is less on our side re: surveillance than we'd hope.
- ranger_danger 5y agosecret FISA courts are also against the constitution, yet here we are.
- otterley 5y agoWhy would it be unconstitutional? Which provision would such a law contravene?
- SMAAART 5y agoHalf of the people in Congress don't really understand what this is all about; the other half who understands, uses Signal.
- JshWright 5y agoWell, I guess we're "lucky" that you have to have well more than half of Congress on board to get anything done...
- stavros 5y agoUnfortunately, the sentence "half of the people in Congress use Signal" is only true for very small values of "half".
- hellbannedguy 5y agoI didn't know much about Signal until today, and I try keep up to date. I bet by monday, every politician, financial institution, Stock Brokers, Lawyers, and tech savy criminals will be using Signal to communicate.
- orhmeh09 5y agoThe ones who use Signal do not necessarily understand. It’s pretty hard to hand it to Matt Gaetz: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-shock-jock-texts-that-could-be-critical-in-the-matt-gaetz-probe https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-shock-jock-texts-that-coul...
- ranger_danger 5y agoOr perhaps more likely, they'll go the lavabit/CALEA route, and order that their platform be modified to allow wiretapping, at which point Signal must choose between either complying with such requests, or going out of business. If that happens, hopefully usage of p2p messaging apps like Briar or Status will gain more traction and usage.
- jojobas 5y ago>complying with such requests, or going out of business Complying with such a request is going out of business.
- majormajor 5y agoI think turning it into a press release / advertising pitch is a poor move that's likely to make harsh new legislation more, not less, likely.
- aesh2Xa1 5y agoTransparency is critical. If Signal cares about the ethics at least as much as the marketing then they did right by the ethics and by their bottom line.
- jollybean 5y ago"Do you have no other way of investigating these criminals?" "Could you not put an officer out to surveille them?", Your argument kind of falls on itself there --> We can surveil them in person, but not digitally? Why? I think the tech crowd has this wrong. The issue - as you have indicated - is not 'By What Means To Surveil'. The issues are: Legitimacy, Proportionality, Oversight. Messages, tech, sign language, in person, phones or messaging pigeons, the issue remains the same: Is there a legitimate reason for access? Is the intervention proportional to the probability of cause, the ostensible crime, the risk to other citizens and the public good? Is there authoritative Judicial oversight of the surveillance, and, is there sufficient Congressional oversight of the legality of the program? Those are the questions. Should police be able to tap Signal (or anything else) for data on anyone they want, for whatever they want, willy nilly without a Warrant or oversight? Definitely not. Should Apple be scanning content for crimes? Probably not, but that's slightly more complicated. Should the police be able to access the Signal messages of someone they apprehended at a murder scene wherein other suspects fled the scene, and are therefore likely the suspects accomplices? Likely yes. Or at lest, most people would agree with it both in the pragmatic sense, and also the Constitutional sense. Should the FBI be able to, with special permission of a Federal Judge, watch all cell tower transactions in 5x5 mile grid grid, while there's a literal manhunt on for literal terrorists during a literal state of emergency? Probably yes again, it's hard because the proportionality and tactics are rare and unique. The technology is a secondary issue.
- hedgedoops2 5y ago> Your argument kind of falls on itself there --> We can surveil them in person, but not digitally? Why? Because, before the internet, when surveillance was a lot of work, this prevented the abuse that is mass surveillance. Only now do we see how much democracy relied on this natural limitation of state power for civil rights. It was never just the need for warrants that maintained civil rights. Remember the Verizon FISA court order authorized surveillance of millions, and that was just one order of hundreds. Power corrupts. State power should be sufficient, but minimal. Being allowed to do physical surveillance only is sufficient to reduce crime rates to the point where most people can safely neglect that crime exists at all, and it is less power because it does not scale. You mention proportionality yourself. Proportionality means that something is not done if the same objective (finding a given murderer) can be achieved in a less rights-infringing way. Proportionality at the policy level, means that a surveillance power may not exist, if its objective (such as safety from murder, i.e. low rates of murder, high chance of finding murderers etc.) can be achieved without the power or with a power that is less likely to be abused or that infringes rights of suspects less. (I admit this is somewhat of an editorialization; the technical meaning of proportionality is in [1]. To be clear the existing legal proportionality principle does not try to directly minimize power; but it does usually present an obstacle whenever new powers are created by law) Limiting power is simpler and less error-prone than allowing power and adding control structures like warrant requirements for the power. It is thus better, if the outcome is the same. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(law)#European_Union_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(law)#European...
- olah_1 5y agoThis is why there should not be a single entity that runs the network. Make it fully decentralized with economic incentives for node operators. some projects trying to do this now are Status, Session, Sylo
- ekianjo 5y agoSignal fights decentralization anyway so they are not a reliable actor.
- personjerry 5y agoThat already exists, it's called the Internet
- nextaccountic 5y agoProblem is, messaging platforms in "the Internet" aren't interoperable. If I use service X, I usually can only talk to people that also uses X. So "the Internet" is mostly composed of silos. Silos are the reason that platforms get centralized in the first place: people generally enjoy using the same X as their peers, so they can communicate in a single platform.
- _carbyau_ 5y agoThe issue is the internet doesn't provide the required service for individuals to find each other directly. We need DNS for everyone, not just the rich...er those bothering to register a name. Make it GUID based, and let people contact each other by GUID instead of phone number. Preferably add privacy enhancing encryption too so that only those with your public key could decrypt your GUID DNS entry to then find your IPv6 address. Or something smarter than that probably.
- salawat 5y agoas soon as you create a namespace like that, you've made the lever that will be utilized for centralized control. In reality, if you had no chance of getting somewhere without the centralized registry, you don't have the connection.
- smoyer 5y agoBonus points for sending the Unix timestamps in millis ... I hope the lawyer who got this response has to hire a consultant too translate it for the court!
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoMy favorite was their footnote URL! > The only information Signal maintains that is encompassed by thesubpoena for any particular user account, identified through a phone number, is the time of account creation and the date of the account’s last connection to Signal servers. That is all. [2] > [2] see e.g. https://signal.org/bigbrother https://signal.org/bigbrother
- arendtio 5y agoI am a bit skeptical about the precision due to the last 3 zeros for the 'last connection date'. It seems to unlikely that it got exactly that moment...
- pabs3 5y agoThey probably reduce the precision to give some plausible deniability in the face of people who have their network connections monitored.
- otterley 5y ago(Non-practicing) Lawyer here. We aren't universally technologically illiterate. Many of us are former programmers, and still are in our spare time. And those people who help you draft patents for your computer-related inventions? Also lawyers.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- smoyer 5y agoOf course not ... If you were you'd be called governors ;)
- deleted 5y ago
- pennaMan 5y agoI would go further and ask for mandatory 24/7 surveillance of elected officials for transparency and to combat corruption every time they bring up this bullshit.
- jodrellblank 5y agoIn the UK the government introduced a "record of everyone's internet history" law and then exempted themselves from it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13087339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13087339
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- snugghash 5y agoI just noticed that my jaw dropped for the first time in recent memory. Wow. Slow clap. UK, US, China... just wow
- easytiger 5y agoThe particularly messed up thing about that and similar laws in the UK is they are made using cross party consensus
- ootsootsoots 5y agoBecause both parties benefit from the status quo The whole thing is still a pyramid scheme Trickle down is a euphemism for pissing on people They think in hierarchy and give us data structures like org charts to distribute that meme, manufacturing consent God on high, down to priests…etc…king on high…baron…etc…most people never learn to talk around the imagery. Futurists have been suggesting the fall of nation states is at hand as cities begin to chafe under outsider rule. Of course then you just have local hierarchy. I’m done seeing the public as capable political agents. The Roman Catholic notion everyone is their own moral agent has allowed people to think their actions only have consequences they choose them to have, as they optimize for increasingly specific stats with little real network value.
- matt123456789 5y agoYes they fucking should. Nobody should be above the law - nobody. There should not be “two tiers” of law enforcement, be it by class or occupation. Everybody should be held to the same standard.
- artificial 5y agoHow do you feel about presidential pardons? Basically sudo for getting around the legal system.
- Goety 5y agoValid points
- jrootabega 5y agoIt wouldn't be a very elaborate rationalization. e.g. "Banks have KYC and AML requirements. We have an information economy. 'Misinformation' is the equivalent to funding terrorism. Therefore, information-exchange platforms will also be required to perform KYC and AIL or be prosecuted. Compute providers, ISPs, payment processors, and crypto exchanges [assuming they still exist when this hypothetical is actually proposed] will be forbidden from serving any platforms that don't."
- einpoklum 5y ago> to justify their request that it be unlawful to provide such services Why are the previous subpoenas Signal Messenger LLC has refused not sufficient for this purpose?
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoOhhh, where can I vote for that last item??
- KarlKemp 5y agoMaybe that’s what congress should do. Until such time, Signal should follow the law, in letter and in spirit. Even if the US democracy is flawed, it’s still a lot closer to the concept than any alternative.
- baktubi 5y agoPretty sure the military recommends their troops use signal for civilian communication when abroad. In addition, I’d wager lots of politicians use it now for obvious reason’s. Ergo that won’t happen. That being said, can’t blame DoJ for trying though.
- crest 5y agoWhy do you consider it acceptable for the DoJ put citizens and their communication at risk? Aren't they supposed to work for the people instead of against them?