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by inigyou 14 days ago
Famously, Pavel Durov (owner of Telegram) was arrested in France a couple of years ago and held in custody until he complied with one he'd received earlier.

Famously, Signal complies with court orders by giving up all the data that's requested that it has, which isn't very much. This is what you expect from E2EE platforms.

A court order to do the impossible is invalid. Telegram gets in trouble because it's possible for them to comply but they choose not to. Subpoenas are usually worded as "you must provide all information you have, relating to ..."
2 comments
account42 14 days ago
But as long as Signal controls the client app, there are very possible court orders to provide access to "encrypted" user chats even if courts haven't made use of those yet (as far as is publicly known).
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ufmace 14 days ago
The published reports of the exact things requested of them in the French arrest seem pretty vague. If they're related to the security of private messages and chats, it would seem to prove the point that they do infact refuse to provide that for anybody. The details around his release seem even more vague. We have only speculation and no actual proof that he or Telegram caved on such a request. As far as I know, we've never seen any charges that definitely came from Telegram revealing the messages of a private group chat.

Meanwhile, if you believe that any Governments actually refrain from prosecuting Signal executives due to their refusal and/or inability to produce the messages from private chats because they have E2EE, well, I've got a nice bridge to sell you.

If they actually are refraining from going after Signal executives in a similar fashion, most likely either 1. Nobody is actually using it for anything interesting, 2. They are actually secretly cooperating somehow, or 3. Governments are already happy with other technical means of extracting the contents of Signal chats they are interested in. See the US FBI's curious sudden lack of interest in Apple's ability, or lack thereof, to extract a wanted suspect's iMessage messages.

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