I don't distrust them today, but I have no way of knowing what their future behaviour will be. I'd prefer not to have to trust.
Yeah, I wish he went with another name, too. Not only is Open Whisper Systems making it more confusing, but it's also quite a mouthful.
(I mean, given a phone number, can't you identify someone's Google Play account anyway? That sounds more useful.)
Not by subpoena alone, but in theory a court order could order them to modify their software (server or client) to collect data. They could fight that court order, and in particular it seems like they'd have a good case on the grounds that such an order would destroy their entire business, but legally a court could at least attempt to issue such an order.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/leaked-documents-expose-secret-...
The interesting part is in this table from the TS/ECI leaks from Core Secrets:
https://theintercept.com/document/2014/10/10/eci-whipgenie-c...
Notice how the lower levels of secrecy talk about how the companies cooperate or are partners. Then, you hit TS/COMINT and TS/ECI to find additional detail:
"the fact that FBI provides assistance with compelled and cooperative partnerships associated with WHIPGENIE"
"details of FBI assistance with compelled and cooperative partnerships with WHIPGENIE"
So, it's a backdooring program with major U.S. companies that the FBI "compels" assistance with for those that don't willingly cooperate. I have no idea what that entails but it works. It might work better on smaller firm with less resources but also maybe less as I think damaging income stream matters to greedy CEO's at public firms more. So, who knows.
Personally, I think they're pulling a variation of Escobars silver or lead policy. You take generous bribes to do what they want or you take generous donations of lead. In this case, legal fines or imprisonment rather than actual lead.
I believe Whisper doesn't want this data. I can even trust that they would never collect it of their own volition. But it's irrelevant if they can simply be compelled to collect it, or even worse, someone within their organization can be compelled to secretly collect it and may even do a better job at this secret collection than Mayer's lackies at Yahoo!.
"Notably, things we don't have stored include anything about a user's contacts (such as the contacts themselves, a hash of the contacts, any other derivative contact information), anything about a user's groups (such as how many groups a user is in, which groups a user is in, the membership lists of a user's groups), or any records of who a user has been communicating with."
If they don't store the contacts, or even a hash of the contact, how can you figure out who was talking to who?
1. "the contacts, or even a hash of the contact" are being not stored by choice rather than by necessity.
2. If OWS chose to start storing these metadata in the future, they could.
3. A protocol where the metadata could not be stored intrinsically would be preferable.
Think of it like email. The body is encrypted, the subject is encrypted, any attachments are encrypted, but in order for them to route the message to the correct destination every message you send still has a "To:" field - their server still decides who to send the notification to.
They don't need to read the contacts or anything of the sort - they just read the "To:" field.
"Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."