Yes, although the way around this for law enforcement is to pressure Apple and Google to remove Signal from the App Store/Play respectively (to protect children!) and work on operating system level bypasses of Signal. I am fearing this scenario.
Come to think of it, that'd be the perfect place to go to demand a wiretap - at least one such popular "LY" service already exists.
I'm still shaking my head at what many regular users will agree to..
I’ve been watching _The Wire_ and Idris Elba’s character sounds like a good overlap, but he feels very unusual (in fiction)--and definitely too careful about OpSec to use that kind of service.
More generally, there’s a lot of anecdotic evidence between problematic behaviour and low-level spelling details: one that is apparently better documented now is a correlation between insurance fraud and whether you capitalise properly the name of your employer on registration form.
If they had developers in, say, France, who would need to accept changes made somewhere else then a single country could not force such secret modifications.
Of course an app is actually a binary, so there must be a way to verify that code + compilation = the published binary.
For iOS users, that will be a death knell.
You press the only non-"give up" button at each stage and you're done.
Remember that Fortnite succeeded in convincing people to do this by the millions. It's not hard.
Somewhat. And sometimes. And when the high-security-site for installing a high-security-tool is asking you to do a thing, it's quite a bit psychologically different than e.g. a reddit post saying "install this apk and approve all prompts: http://www.5z8.info/hack-outlook_w2f7vj_dogfights"
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced they could do this, but they would rather not because it's much harder, since it requires a special warrant with high evidence thresholds for each user. This reinforces the claim that what they really want is an ability to get any messaging data without a warrant, but they don't want to say so.
The Internet may interpret censorship as damage and route around it, but spy agencies interpret laws as inconveniences and ignore them.
As access closes in one place (i.e application layer), they will just get closer to the source (i.e operating system or supply chain)
Same goes for music and video - we won't be legally allowed to hear and watch non-DRM-playable devices as the speakers and displays will be rented not owned by corporations.
We have almost arrived at the Rental Economy, where we dont own anything and are at the behest of corporations. It's modern serfdom