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Comment by jcfrei | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how long Signal will stay up before they get a knock on the door - just like lavabit did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit#Suspension_and_gag_ord...

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IIRC Signal did get a "knock at the door" and, rightly, had almost nothing to give the government - mostly because of how they designed their architecture, but admittedly partially because of the metadata they chose not to store.

Lavabit's situation was different because they were a "choose not to look" solution, not a "can't look" solution.

That said, Signal is centralized, so it's not like they are particularly robust against that sort of thing, just that other than getting Signal shut down, any strong-arm tactics are unlikely to result in very useful information from OWS.

For anyone interested, he's referring to this:

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/new-documents-reveal-g...

"mostly because of how they designed their architecture"

Doesn't matter how you design the architecture. Someone can just force them to "update" their app via the app store, and all of your privacy is gone.

It's open source, and you can build it yourself if you're worried about the app store being compromised.

No you cannot.

Yes, you absolutely can.

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/blob/master...

I think if Signal gets shut down it will be a real turning point. Either a huge number of people are going to move to the Riot solution of hosting their own messaging, or a hundred new Signal's are going to pop up just forking the already OSS Signal code.

I thought the Snowden revelations were going to be the turning point. But it turned out it was not a turning point, but just a wake-up call.

I honestly don't see a revolution coming if Signal is shut down. There will be some angry folks, sure, and that will last a while, but then everyone will move on. Exactly as it happened with the Snowden revelations.

I doubt any sort of real revolution would happen, my comment was probably worded badly. I meant more as a turning point for the sort of privacy-conscious people who already use Signal. I, and a lot of the people I talk to, take a position on personal tech privacy on something of a middleground, not the full nuclear option and not the Facebook option.

If Signal goes down I would speculate a lot of people who already have things like encrypted messengers, adblockers, things of that nature, would start to move to the only-vpn, no javascript run ever, no Google Play Services on your phone, no proprietary software at any stage of your life sort of deal.

And besides, if Signal was shut down, who knows what solutions might crop up, that are even harder to strong-arm.

Truly decentralized solutions like riot may be the next step. I have a group of friends that have been in a singular group chat since high school and I plus one other convinced everyone to move to Signal the day after election day. In another couple years if riot matures and/or Signal shows signs of being inadequate, one or more of us will probably host our own riot messaging server

Just to say concisely what the other comments here said: Signal can't betray its users the way Lavabit did, because it's designed responsibly.

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