The operators of the Signal Messenger have announcedthat (again) a legal request from a US court to submit user information has been received. No data could be made available here, what is particularly interesting for me is that for months it was prohibited to report on it for months due to confidentiality orders – and how the court showed itself in dealing with Signal from the point of view there:
Although we did not have anything essential to submit, this application was also provided with a non-disclosure order that was extended four times. Although the judge approved four consecutive confidentiality orders, the court never acknowledged receipt of our partial unseal request, did not schedule a hearing, and did not respond to calls from attorneys to schedule a hearing.
It is also exciting how one would deal with the procedure in Germany and the EU – Signal points out that one does not collect anything, except for Unix time stamps on the question of when a certain account was connected at all:
Since everything in Signal is end-to-end encrypted by default, there is simply not the wide range of personal information on Signal’s servers that is normally easily accessible in other apps. (…) It is impossible to give out data that we did not have access to in the first place. Signal doesn’t have access to your messages, chat list, groups, contacts, stickers, profile name or avatar, or even the GIFs you’re looking for. Our response to the subpoena will therefore sound familiar to you. It is the same “Account and Subscriber Information” that we can provide: Unix timestamps for the date each account was created and the date each account was last connected to the Signal service. That’s it.
Sounds like real secure communication, but: In Germany the problem is solved very unconventionally, in this country it does not help a service if it does not record the IP address, for example. He can be instructed to collect the IP address at least from the time of the court order, even if it speaks against his business model. The same applies in other countries, which is why Protonmail, for example, provides information about IP addresses. If you do not actually provide any IP addresses, Signal’s model is likely to lead to controversy very quickly in Germany.
