Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Signal Says It Can't Allow Australian Government Access to Users' Chats

posted by takyon on Friday December 14 2018, @10:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-find-the-signal dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

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."

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Signal Says It Can't Allow Australian Government Access to Users' Chats | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 43 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @06:05AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @06:05AM (#774707)

    Yes. There 24million Australians but only a few hundreds politicians. It's far easier to cut off a hundred diseased heads than to march >12million upright dingoes to the right ballot.

  • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday December 15 2018, @04:47PM (2 children)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Saturday December 15 2018, @04:47PM (#774813) Journal

    Then all you will get is another hundred diseased heads winning the next vote.

    --
    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @06:16PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @06:16PM (#774860)

      that's ok, cuz you can kill them too. rinse, repeat.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @08:17PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @08:17PM (#774914)

        It's very inefficient. It won't feed that many people. You'll have to kill the people that vote for them also if you want to solve the hunger problem and population control.