Savvy readers of the documents below will notice something new: the “Information Sufficient to Show Interstate Wiring” segment in the subpoena and response, which appears to be intended to support a jurisdictional theory that Signal messages cross state lines, even when they are sent between users in the same state. These questions weren’t in the subpoena from 2016, and they feel like something out of a Law and Order episode from the mid-90’s when “The Internet” was still young and people didn’t really understand how it worked.

I'd take exactly that tack on the presumption that the odds of getting a technology-averse judge were non-zero. If you get someone with a clue, they give you side-eye and admonish you for being disingenuous. If you get someone clueless, they scratch their head and rule in your favor because it makes sense to their circa-Ma Bell understanding of technology. The internet, after all, is not a big truck - it's a series of tubes.

And yet, I am not 100% confident that Signal isn't a honeypot, and that these aren't marketing efforts.

Would you care to elaborate?

I can share a story - when I first signed up for Signal, a friend already on Signal responded with a "lol." I asked him what was funny and he commented that lots of people were getting on Signal that didn't exactly need to be on Signal. He laughed again and mentioned that he was on Signal because, as part of the Post team on Citizenfour, Edward Snowden insisted that all communication was over Signal because, to the best of Snowden's knowledge, Signal was the furthest from being cracked. My friend told Snowden that Signal or not, he was a British national applying for citizenship so it was reasonable to assume he'd been under wiretap since the shop first talked about the project so why were we talking about Signal now...

Snowden still insisted on Signal.

Keep in mind that Signal exists in its current form because Brian Acton had no trust that Zuckerberg wouldn't fuck up the privacy shit he'd built into WhatsApp. As WhatsApp is basically the backbone of our communication at the birth center, I have a keen interest in "things other than WhatsApp." Unfortunately my user testing indicates that nobody wants to switch to Signal because it doesn't do gifs, it doesn't do stickers, it doesn't do themes and it doesn't do all the media-rich bullshit you need to communicate like a teenager; back when I signed on it wouldn't even do MMS. Telegram, meanwhile, is like Myspace to WhatsApp's Facebook so when I mention to anyone that it's owned and controlled by a Russian oligarch and that nobody thinks it's even vaguely secure they shrug, go meh and send me a gif of a poodle wearing sunglasses.