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The company whose message-scrambling software is being adopted across Silicon Valley has had a first legal test of its commitment to privacy.
Open Whisper Systems—whose Signal app pioneered the end-to-end encryption technique now used by a swathe of messaging services—was subpoenaed for information about one of its users earlier this year, according to legal correspondence released Tuesday.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented Open Whisper Systems, says the company didn't produce the user's name, address, call logs or other details requested by the government.
"That's not because Signal chose not to provide logs of information," ACLU lawyer Brett Kaufman said in a telephone interview. "It's just that it couldn't." Created by anarchist yachtsman Moxie Marlinspike and a crew of surf-happy developers, Signal has evolved from a niche app used by dissidents and protest leaders into the foundation stone for the encryption of huge tranches of the world's communications data.
http://phys.org/news/2016-10-subpoena-privacy-encrypted-messaging-app.html
[More Details At]: New Documents Reveal Government Effort to Impose Secrecy on Encryption Company
[Also Covered By]:
The Washington Post
ABC News
[Legal Correspondence]: Legal correspondence released by the ACLU:
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Tuesday October 04 2016, @08:58PM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by opinionated_science on Tuesday October 04 2016, @09:20PM
deceptive? You have the source? Does what it says?
Be specific - how is it deceptive? Surely you understand that every single piece of hardware is plausibly backdoored - the only way to prevent that is software.
Grant, we cannot be sure there isn't a hardwire keylogger that has been include because of $NSL
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Tuesday October 04 2016, @09:29PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2016, @06:24PM
he said the marketing was deceptive, you jackass. the appropriate response to his post is "thank you for the info".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2016, @10:34PM
By your standards nothing is safe.
What they are claiming can be legitimate, that their software is locked down and doesn't leak info by design. To claim that the hardware or OS it runs on IS compromised in such a way as to render this software ineffective HAS NOT BEEN PROVEN. Onus is on you, especially since you insist alternative OSes such as Linux have no weakness that are exploited, another claim that HAS NOT BEEN PROVEN.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2016, @09:27AM
To claim that the hardware or OS it runs on IS compromised in such a way as to render this software ineffective HAS NOT BEEN PROVEN.
Many modern CPUs have microcode that you can't even inspect. There's plenty of proprietary firmware. Many operating systems come loaded with proprietary software or are themselves proprietary software, which means the computer essentially has many black boxes that prevent you and/or others from even having a reasonable chance of understanding it.
In an age where the government conducts mass surveillance on the populace and exploits every bug possible and even tries to insert backdoors into existing software, saying that many operating systems or even hardware might be compromised is hardly unreasonable, and this is especially true when you have operating systems which are proprietary software or rely on proprietary software.
especially since you insist alternative OSes such as Linux have no weakness that are exploited
That's not the claim. We must not accept software that does not respect our freedoms, or we have no real control over it. With Free Software, you can inspect the code yourself, hire someone you trust, organize a group to inspect the code, or any number of other things; you have options that you don't have with proprietary software and are not dependent upon a specific company or developer, even if you do not always make use of those options. Having the freedom to inspect the code is necessary if you want to have any confidence whatsoever in the security of the software; black boxes do not inspire confidence. Free Software is not immune to exploits or backdoors, but the additional freedoms it grants users do help to prevent those things, even if it doesn't prevent 100% of them.
It's amazing how we live in a society filled with computers, and yet there are still people who don't seem to care that many of those computers are simply incomprehensible to us. How can that possibly be acceptable?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2016, @06:39PM
another fine example of the whining people do when you bring up inconvenient truths. they attack the messenger and defend their masters. as aldous huxley said in the interview at berkely before he croaked, "people can be made to quite enjoy their servitude" or some such shit. the OP was simply pointing out that it is dishonest of OWS to fail to mention the full/actual security situation when advertising their products. It's irresponsible and callous to not tell people that may need secure comm for their safety and that may not be security aware/IT people that "oh, btw if you run our shit on any of the available platforms you may still be screwed b/c they are not secure". That should be obvious to anyone who pays attention to security/privacy matters, as it was to me when i first looked at this stuff a few years ago but i guess if you're one of these dipshits who installs closed source "security" software on your closed source OS and thinks you're secure you're too ignorant to even talk to.