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Signal says it can't allow government access to users' chats
Last week, the Australian government passed the country's controversial Access and Assistance Bill 2018 into law, legislation that allows government agencies to demand access to encrypted communications. Companies that don't comply with the new law could face fines of up to AU$10 million ($7.3 million). A number of companies that stand to be affected have spoken out about the legislation, and Signal has now joined in, explaining that it won't be able to fulfill such requests if asked.
"By design, Signal does not have a record of your contacts, social graph, conversation list, location, user avatar, user profile name, group memberships, group titles or group avatars," Signal's Joshua Lund wrote in a blog post. "The end-to-end encrypted contents of every message and voice/video call are protected by keys that are entirely inaccessible to us." Lund added that Signal is open source, meaning anyone can "verify or examine the code for each release." "People often use Signal to share secrets with their friends, but we can't hide secrets in our software," he wrote. "We can't include a backdoor in Signal."
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday December 14 2018, @11:09PM (3 children)
Given that the code is easily available, we are all waiting for Australia to declare math illegal in order to catch Bad People.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Friday December 14 2018, @11:24PM (1 child)
Well, here in the good 'ol USA, Texas declared some glassware only legal with a permit [crscientific.com] when when they didn't like what some uses of chemistry could accomplish. Despite the fact that you can make glassware pretty easily in your garage, even pretty fancy and broadly-temperature-tolerant glassware.
And then there are plants that are illegal here. You know: dirt, seed, water. Complex stuff!
You think politicians aren't willing to declare some kinds of software illegal along the same lines as these other natural and somewhat inevitable things?
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Government: Designed to provide you with "service" and...
...the Media: Designed to provide you with Vaseline.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @11:59AM
I thought (not really, but still) Texas was all about Small Government. How could this be!?
(Score: 5, Informative) by deimtee on Saturday December 15 2018, @01:52AM
Just to prove that our politicians can be as stupid as anyone else's :
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/malcolm-turnbull-prime-minister-laws-of-mathematics-do-not-apply-australia-encryption-l-a7842946.html [independent.co.uk]
(Yes, that was last week's prime minister, but this week's is at least as stupid.)
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.