> It's unlikely that prosecutors don't realize how Signal works.
Why would you expect them to understand how Signal works? A lawyer does not and cannot become a subject matter expert for every aspect of a case they undertake.
A lawyer's job is to investigate every possible avenue for evidence to support their case. They're going to ask Signal for everything imaginable and have legal recourse if they discover at a later date that Signal withheld information.
A lawyer with a complete understanding of how Signal works and intimate knowledge of it would still send the same subpoena and expect the same response. They would never say "Oh Signal? That's a dead end, don't bother."
Because a prosecutor calls up the IT crime lab and asks for the rundown. And since they have massive budgets, there actually is a well trained head of the IT crime lab who is perfectly capable of understanding and explaining (to a jury) how Signal works.
The expert in question being the company which made it, because software isn’t a commodity like steel [0] where any two manufacturers are making basically interchangeable stuff.
There's proprietary stuff in the steel business, and there's stuff that everyone knows. Same with software. The way end-to-end encryption works is common knowledge. Some of the same people here who know that Signal doesn't have this data are the same people who are those experts.
> Why would you expect them to understand how Signal works? A lawyer does not and cannot become a subject matter expert for every aspect of a case they undertake.
I really hope the lawyer I’m hiring is at least a subject matter expert on the specific laws around the subject. Then a simple google search would explain how this data isn’t available.
Why would you expect them to understand how Signal works? A lawyer does not and cannot become a subject matter expert for every aspect of a case they undertake.
A lawyer's job is to investigate every possible avenue for evidence to support their case. They're going to ask Signal for everything imaginable and have legal recourse if they discover at a later date that Signal withheld information.
A lawyer with a complete understanding of how Signal works and intimate knowledge of it would still send the same subpoena and expect the same response. They would never say "Oh Signal? That's a dead end, don't bother."