Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ethics_gradient 3346 days ago
To get that data, governments may need a bunch of things: the company being under their jurisdiction in some legally relevant sense, laws allowing for such requests (those may or may not be needed, sadly), the company keeping the data. If the company doesn't keep the data, they could try to compel it to or hack it, but those may be more difficult. So that's a lot of steps.

For this reason Signal is hardly comparable to Whatsapp and many other apps using the same protocol: the latter group openly logs metadata, the former says they almost don't, is open source, is more trustworthy due to the organizational structure. Finally, there's even some evidence ( https://whispersystems.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand... ) that they don't.
1 comments
forgotpwtomain 3346 days ago
The server implementation is not open-source. I have a lot of respect for what OWS is doing but let's not peddle in false assurances.
link
ethics_gradient 3345 days ago
Oh, I was thinking about this upon typing my message for the first time, but then forgot it upon retyping (my browser was being erratic). Thanks for the note.

At least parts of the server are open for a long time though[1], and they also recently exchanged some stuff into WebRTC. Could anybody clarify what part of it is still nonfree?

[1] https://github.com/whispersystems/Signal-Server/

link