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Something I’ve been hearing about on podcasts is how the Jan 6 insurrection trials has a bunch of Signal messages in evidence. Does anyone know how these were obtained?

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They took them from someone's phone.

Sure, but phones are themselves encrypted. Did they brute force access to the phones or did the people give up the messages voluntarily?

Last I checked, beyond the phones, iCloud backups are subject to warrants and not encrypted or are local backups encrypted. If you get an unencrypted Signal backup, possible to extract the user’s Signal encryption key and rebuild the backups to extract the messages.

Phones themselves are as secure as know vulnerabilities of whatever version of the phone hardware and OS version.

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