[ConcernedCitizen]

The misleading headline: "Federal investigators say they used encrypted Signal messages to charge Oath Keepers leader" - clearly an attempt at creating fear for users of Signal. But pay attention to the wording of this quote from the story.

It’s not clear how investigators gained access to the messages used in the arrest of the far-right group leader, Stewart Rhodes, and other defendants. Representatives for Signal, the Department of Justice, and Federal Bureau of Investigation did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.

One possibility is that a recipient with access to the messages handed them over to investigators. The complaint references group messages run on the app, so it’s possible a participant in those chats cooperated.

They all but admitted to having an informant inside the capitol building or around the events of 6 January. "A recipient with access" meaning anybody that was in communication with leadership of the extremist group known as the Oath Keepers, gave the federal government screenshots or digital copies of the chats from the group.

They can't give comment on that because they still had a man or woman inside the group feeding them intelligence. As for Signal?

"Signal messages are encrypted with the Signal Protocol (formerly known as the TextSecure Protocol). The protocol combines the Double Ratchet Algorithm, prekeys, and an Extended Triple Diffie–Hellman (X3DH) handshake. It uses Curve25519, AES-256, and HMAC-SHA256 as primitives. The protocol provides confidentiality, integrity, authentication, participant consistency, destination validation, forward secrecy, backward secrecy (a.k.a. future secrecy), causality preservation, message unlinkability, message repudiation, participation repudiation, and asynchronicity. It does not provide anonymity preservation, and requires servers for the relaying of messages and storing of public key material."

"...the closest piece of information to metadata that the Signal server stores is the last time each user connected to the server, and the precision of this information is reduced to the day, rather than the hour, minute, and second".


Read more here: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/13/feds-say...eader.html

[Marshland]

Seems most likely a participant cooperated and handed out the chat logs. Like the article suggests Signal is horrible for anonymity since it requires a phone number and still hasn't implemented usernames

[ConcernedCitizen]

Seems most likely a participant cooperated and handed out the chat logs. Like the article suggests Signal is horrible for anonymity since it requires a phone number and still hasn't implemented usernames

Regardless what's happening here and sorry to spoil anyone's expectations but - don't do illegal shit on networks and the runners of said networks won't feel obligated to protect the other users by turning what information they do have into the authorities. It should go without saying. But I said it. And that's the reality of Signal, as they've demonstrated before. That or the government will fine them $10k/day for not giving information and possibly shut down the services, ruining it for everyone.

[Marshland]

Seems most likely a participant cooperated and handed out the chat logs. Like the article suggests Signal is horrible for anonymity since it requires a phone number and still hasn't implemented usernames

Regardless what's happening here and sorry to spoil anyone's expectations but - don't do illegal shit on networks and the runners of said networks won't feel obligated to protect the other users by turning what information they do have into the authorities. It should go without saying. But I said it. And that's the reality of Signal, as they've demonstrated before. That or the government will fine them $10k/day for not giving information and possibly shut down the services, ruining it for everyone.

True, a problem most if not all centralised servers have. I do remember somewhere that when Iran blockaded Signal there was a call to setup TLS proxy servers for Iranians continue to use Signal but if the US government comes knocking thats another story ofcourse