Signal still knows nothing about you, but the government still continues to ask us if we do.
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. This order requested a wide variety of information we don’t have, including the target’s correspondence, contacts, groups, calls, address.
As usual, 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. In this case, the order identified the user by their profile name, which is encrypted and inaccessible to Signal, so we were not able to even identify the user in question.
We’d like to thank the ACLU for their continuing, untiring, and enduring assistance – particularly our counsel for this response, Brett Max Kaufman and Jennifer Granick.
We’d also like to thank everyone who uses Signal. Our commitment to you remains unchanged. We’ll keep working with effective and talented organizations like the ACLU to respond to future government requests, and we’ll keep publishing our responses here.
The transcript for this request can be found below.