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US Subpoena Tests Privacy Promise of Encrypted Messaging App

posted by janrinok on Tuesday October 04 2016, @07:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-I'd-have-to-shoot-you dept.

AnonTechie writes:

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:

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Tuesday October 04 2016, @09:15PM

    by Arik (4543) on Tuesday October 04 2016, @09:15PM (#410330) Journal
    Thinking about it, the guys at the NSA aren't dumb. They have to realize that all these compromised devices cannot be trusted - not even by them. They aren't the only ones that know and use these exploits, not by a long shot. So what do they use?

    I want to think that they have something roughly analogous to the the fictional 'Q' of the James Bond stories - a section of hardware geeks who can fabricate functional and secure systems that can masquerade as commercially available, compromised equivalents. The other possibility is that even our top operatives are relying on fundamentally insecure devices to do their work, with obvious potential for catastrophic consequences.

    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
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