According to the subpoena, investigators sought “all subscriber information” belonging to what appeared to be six Signal users. The legal request to Signal came from the US Attorney’s Office in the Central District in California in the form of a federal grand jury subpoena. Every single time the government has tried this-from the FBI’s insistence in 2016 that Apple create new software to grant access to a device, to the introduction of the EARN IT Act in Congress last year-cybersecurity experts have pushed back. This is at least the second request of this kind that Signal has received in the last five years, and in the same time period, similar government demands to pry apart end-to-end encrypted communications have become commonplace. Signal-the private, end-to-end encrypted messaging app that surged in popularity in recent months-once again reminded criminal investigators that it could not fully comply with a legal request for user records and communications because of what it asserts as a simple, unchanging fact: The records do not exist on Signal’s servers.

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