For those of you who have used Signal I think this Press Release is really some clever marketing. Basically reinforcing the claim that their servers or systems do not log any identifying user information or communications.
Here is a quote from the Article.
Signal Released their own statement with copies of the actual Subpoena https://signal.org/bigbrother/central-california-grand-jury/.
Here is Signal's formal response to the Subpoena.
For now I'm encouraged by this. It's basically a big Middle Finger to the California Grand Jury, and I'm sure they are not accustomed to not getting the information that they request.
Here is a quote from the Article.
A Californian grand jury wants Signal to hand over the details of a user involved in a criminal investigation.
The IM platform responded by saying they have nothing to share except for account connection timestamps.
The submitted subpoena requests third-party and data-routing details for reasons unclear.
Signal has received a subpoena coming from the United States Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California, asking the end-to-end encrypted IM platform to hand over user data that was determined to be relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation conducted by Homeland Security Investigations.
The subpoena requires that a custodian of records from Signal appears before the grand jury and produces the following:
User name, address, and date and time of the account creation.
Date and time of Signal app download as well as all app access records.
Identification of all possible third parties that are involved in the activation of Signal accounts.
All user correspondence associated with the given phone number.
In addition to the above, the subpoena requests the Signal team to clarify what information travels outside the State of California when a user based there creates an account or when two users based there communicate. This sounds like a weird question to ask, but it’s probably relevant to jurisdiction – and possibly also requested as a way to point the legal pressure elsewhere.
Signal Released their own statement with copies of the actual Subpoena https://signal.org/bigbrother/central-california-grand-jury/.
Here is Signal's formal response to the Subpoena.
Because everything in Signal is end-to-end encrypted by default, the broad set of personal information that is typically easy to retrieve in other apps simply doesn’t exist on Signal’s servers. The subpoena requested a wide variety of information that fell into this nonexistent category, including the addresses of the users, their correspondence, and the name associated with each account.
Just like last time, we couldn’t provide any of that. It’s impossible to turn over data that we never had access to in the first place. Signal doesn’t have access to your messages; your chat list; your groups; your contacts; your stickers; your profile name or avatar; or even the GIFs you search for. As a result, our response to the subpoena will look familiar. It’s the same set of “Account and Subscriber Information” that we provided in 2016: Unix timestamps for when each account was created and the date that each account last connected to the Signal service.
For now I'm encouraged by this. It's basically a big Middle Finger to the California Grand Jury, and I'm sure they are not accustomed to not getting the information that they request.