The first attempt by the federal government to gather information about users of a top messaging application was foiled, the company said on Tuesday, because the company is purposefully unable to access that data.
The Obama administration sought information from the company, Open Whisper Systems, in connection with an FBI criminal investigation.
The bureau routinely uses legal documents known as national security letters to demand user information from tech companies. The tactic includes a simultaneous gag order preventing a company from revealing the request for an extended period of time.
But in this case, the company said, it has handed over no information, and won’t be able to provide any because it doesn’t have any. It said in a blog post it got a subpoena this year from the Eastern District of Virginia.
The company said it was unable to comply with the order, which demanded information on two users who are unnamed, because it does not have the ability to collect personal information. “We’ve designed the Signal service to minimize the data we retain about Signal users, so the only information we can produce in response to a request like this is the date and time a user registered with Signal and the last date of a user’s connectivity to the Signal service,” the company said.
“Notably, things we don’t have stored include anything about a user’s contacts (such as the contacts themselves, a hash of the contacts, any other derivative contact information), anything about a user’s groups (such as how many groups a user is in, which groups a user is in, the membership lists of a user’s groups), or any records of who a user has been communicating with,” the company noted. “All message contents are end to end encrypted, so we don’t have that information either.”
Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden weighed in on Twitter, noting the issue confirmed his preference for Signal over other options. Snowden has slammed several of Signal’s competitors, especially Google’s Allo, last month dubbing it “Google Surveillance.”
Tech companies, take note: if you handle a National Security Letter right, the court ends up publicly promoting your privacy policy. https://t.co/yAfFjquBGs
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 4, 2016
Open Whisper Systems, represented in the case by the American Civil Liberties Union, said it hoped to achieve the same outcome when faced with similar issues in the future. “We’re committed to treating any future requests the same way: working with effective and talented organizations like the ACLU, and publishing transcripts of our responses to government requests,” it said.
