It might be old news to you, if you happen to be familiar with both the law governing electronic communications privacy and the technical nuances of your encrypted messaging app(s) of choice. While it’s possible to piece together some of the information in the chart by scouring app makers’ public documentation and courts’ criminal dockets, the FBI conveniently pulled it into one at-a-glance page. (WhatsApp recently started rolling out the option to E2EE message backups in the cloud, rendering the FBI chart slightly out-of-date.) WhatsApp messages can be backed up to iCloud or Google Drive, so a search warrant to one of those cloud services may yield WhatsApp data including message content (although a search warrant to WhatsApp won’t return message content). If an iMessage user has iCloud backups turned on, a copy of the encryption key is backed up along with the messages (for recovery purposes) and will be disclosed as part of Apple’s warrant return, enabling the messages to be read. True, E2EE renders users’ messages inaccessible to law enforcement in transit, but it’s a different story for cloud storage. That last part may come as a surprise to some iMessage and WhatsApp users, given that we’re talking about E2EE messaging. (Think, for example, about a warrant asking for “all records” in a provider’s possession pertaining to a user: the more information it retains about its users, the more it can be required to provide to law enforcement.) This ranges from the minimal information available from Signal and Telegram, to the basic subscriber information and other metadata that several services disclose to the FBI, and even “limited” stored message content from three of the nine apps: LINE (which, as said, still supports non-E2EE chats), iMessage, and WhatsApp. The chart illuminates the variation in how much data different services collect and retain about users and their communications-and consequently, what data they’ll provide to law enforcement given a valid warrant, subpoena, or court order. This variance may explain why the document refers to the apps as “secure” instead of “E2EE.” And WeChat, owned by Chinese giant Tencent, does not support end-to-end encryption at all (just client-to-server encryption). E2EE is on by default in newer versions of LINE, but it may not be turned on in older clients. As for the rest, Telegram uses default end-to-end encryption (E2EE) in some contexts, but not others. Most of these apps- iMessage, Signal, Threema, Viber, WhatsApp, and Wickr-end-to-end encrypt messages by default. The apps included in the chart are iMessage, LINE, Signal, Telegram, Threema, Viber, WeChat, WhatsApp (owned by Meta, fka Facebook), and Wickr (which was acquired by AWS in June). 7, 2021, the document states that it reflects FBI capabilities as of November 2020.
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Kudos to government-transparency nonprofit Property of the People (POTP), run by “FOIA guru” Ryan Shapiro and indefatigable lawyer Jeffrey Light, for obtaining this record under the Freedom of Information Act.ĭated Jan. The one-page document should give useful guidance to privacy-conscious people – including journalists, whistleblowers, and activists – while also helping to dispel misconceptions about the FBI’s surveillance capabilities (or lack thereof) in the encrypted messaging context. Exactly what’s available, though, varies widely by app. It shows that with legal process, the FBI can get various types of metadata, and in some cases even stored message content. federal law enforcement obtain from providers of encrypted messaging services? A recently disclosed January 2021 document from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) supplies a concise summary with respect to nine different “secure messaging” apps.