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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: 4, Insightful) by opinionated_science on Tuesday October 04 2016, @09:20PM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Tuesday October 04 2016, @09:20PM (#410333)

    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

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  • (Score: 2) by melikamp on Tuesday October 04 2016, @09:29PM

    by melikamp (1886) on Tuesday October 04 2016, @09:29PM (#410342) Journal
    I get as specific as I can in the first post.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2016, @06:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2016, @06:24PM (#410753)

    he said the marketing was deceptive, you jackass. the appropriate response to his post is "thank you for the info".