The subpoena is from Homeland Security Investigations at LAX airport.
They deal specifically with crimes that involve international transport. So this is human trafficking, drug smuggling, money mules, etc.
To be honest the rest of it is just standard "we have some phone numbers" boilerplate. Same thing was probably sent to Facebook, Twitter, etc. with the hopes that someone was dumb enough to login and check their messages from a burner phone.
Edit: Rereading it, this is a grand jury. They likely already know the who, what, why, and how. Signal's response will go to support other evidence that they may have recovered from cell phones or cell network. Grand juries historically result in a 95%+ chance of indictment so this isn't a fishing expedition.
The structure of grand juries makes it so that the defense is unable to mount a defense. The fact that grand juries often result in indictment has vanishing little relevance for whether or not it’s a fishing expedition. Further, no one is saying it is a fishing expedition. It’s a request for information that Signal isn’t designed to be able to answer.
You’re also just speculating about the nature of the crime, but saying it confidently, like, oh, this is definitely true. You don’t know.
Grand Juries are a really weird American thing†. The Grand Jury is entirely dependant on the prosecutor for guidance, so as an outsider it appears to me that their real purpose is to enable politically appointed prosecutors to pretend this anonymous "Grand jury" decided not to prosecute somebody when in reality what happened is that the prosecutor didn't want to. So now it's not the prosecutor's fault an obviously guilty person walked free, and yet conveniently they don't need to prosecute anybody they don't want to.
† Americans didn't invent them, but they did keep them after everybody else went "Wait, this is a terrible idea" and abolished the Grand Jury.
The original idea of a grand jury was to prevent the state (really, the king) from maliciously defaming citizens/subjects, especially ones living far away from the power centers. The system has evolved into one where grand juries will "indict a ham sandwich," as the saying goes. I don't mind the idea of a meaningful check on prosecutors, given that in Common Law they have near total discretion, but the current system ain't it.
Yeah, I’m an American and it feels that way to me. A perfect example is all the grand juries attempting to charge police officers who’ve killed someone. They usually don’t work, but when you hear from the jurors recently you find out the prosecutor sandbagged the whole thing.
But trial by jury continues to be used in several countries (maybe in more restricted ways but it still a thing) or is there something special about a "Grand Jury"?
The system of having a judge/prosecutor with broad investigative powers is unknown in the US, which is probably a good thing given how the rest of the system is organized.
The jury that hears the evidence in a trial is referred to as the petit jury (small jury). It is convened for a single case.
The grand jury is a standing body (also supposed to be drawn from the populace, and with definite tenure) which hears preliminary evidence and in theory decides whether there is enough of a case that an actual trial would be warranted. It can issue subpoenas (as in this situation).
The rest of the US system is weird. At the federal level the people who judge the cases are a whole branch who do pretty much nothing but that. The actual bringing of the cases is the responsibility of the executive. Oh, various departments of the executive have their own "courts" too that rule with no juries. There is no constitutional reason why this whole apparatus could not be part of the judicial branch but I've not seen any interest in that happening. Actually the executive's courts are pretty clearly not constitutional but they have survived enough challenges that they are simply the way they are.
At the state level the same system is roughly followed but in most, or perhaps all states, the attorneys general (who oversee all prosecutions) and Supreme Court judges are elected. Sheriffs too, which in some states are important police, and even some chiefs of police. You might think that this direct election would reduce the chance of corruption but of course it seems to run the opposite way. The longstanding American distaste for competence is the strongest force against a trained, standing set of people to do things.
> Actually the executive's courts are pretty clearly not constitutional but they have survived enough challenges that they are simply the way they are.
They are Constitutional, they just perform Article II executive functions and are established under Article I powers of Congress; despite being called “courts”, they do not exercise any part of the Constitutional judicial power. (Hence, why they are described as “Article I courts” as opposed to the “Article III courts”.)
Not all states have judicial elections. In Virginia, for example, judges are appointed by the legislature. There are also some that appoint rather than elect attorneys general and local prosecutors.
Yes a grand jury is just the prosecutor and jury. It's secret and the defendant doesn't even know. It's a way to start a case, not sure when a prosecutor needs or doesn't need a grand jury.
There are reasons in which it is an appropriate or desirable alternative to a preliminary hearing. The California Grand Jury Association cites multiple surveys that have been taken of California district attorneys, who listed the following factors as influential in the decision to seek a grand jury indictment rather than using the preliminary hearing:
• High public interest in the case;
• The fact that a preliminary hearing would take more time than a grand jury hearing;
• The necessity for calling children or timid witnesses who would be subject to cross‑examination at a preliminary hearing;
• The ability to test a witness before a jury;
• Where the secrecy of the grand jury may allow defendants to be charged and taken into custody before they can pose potential danger to a witness' safety or flee from the jurisdiction;
• Where the identity of undercover agents needs to be protected;
• The existence of a weak or doubtful case which the district attorney wishes to test;
• The opportunity to involve the community in case screening; and
• Whether the case involves malfeasance in office.
Thanks for the list, I still would like to understand why a Grand Jury needs to exist when our countries, presumably, also have the same set of problems but not a Grand Jury.
I wonder how other common law systems handle this (not a lawyer, am genuinely asking).
To add to the other comment a Grand Jury is also often made up of jurors called in using the prosecutor's private phone contacts. A few ex-cops and former work buddies. People also go to jail because of misuse of power by grand juries. There's a great documentary on Netflix but I can't remember its name right now. Suffice to say there aren't grand juries in any well working and fair justice system. It's abuse and/or theater 100% of the time.
I will offer a counter-example to this. I was an alternate for my local county's grand jury for a year. I was selected through the same voir dire process used to place me on a petit jury for a criminal trial years later. It was wholly random. AFAIK, I didn't end up in the jury pool because I knew a prosecutor or cop. Were "I know a guy who knows a guy" the selection criteria, I would have never ended up on the grand jury, as my father was personal friends with a local defense attorney; the question posed to me wouldn't have been if I hate cops, but whether I knew or was associated with anyone sharing the same name as my father.
The main difference I assume is that for a normal jury the defendant can challenge jurors, while for a grand jury the defendant often doesn't even know it is sitting on their case.
I could be wrong but my understanding is that grand jury is sort of like a trial jury (trail as in demo/mock, not a court trial) to show the evidence and case from the prosecutor side only in order to get an indictment. You can perform a grand jury multiple times in order to get the outcome indictment you need to finally charge someone. If you can’t convince a grand jury to get an indictment, then you will have an even harder time when the case goes to actual court with the defence being present with their own side of story.
So I guess there’s pros and cons to this. Ultimately the actual court trial is what matters but of course an indictment is mostly enough to destroy someone’s reputation even if they get acquitted later on (I think government has a 95%+ success rate or something).
This is not accurate in the US. I was called in via the same system as the petit juries- my name was selected from voter rolls and I received a summons in the mail. Law enforcement and criminal law professionals are specifically filtered from the process.
> You’re also just speculating about the nature of the crime, but saying it confidently, like, oh, this is definitely true. You don’t know.
HSI is a fairly narrowly scoped law enforcement agency. I've dealt with multiple agents over there, and at one point considered joining when I wanted to get out of computers. But feel free to call the press office and ask if you don't want to believe a random on the internet.
There’s a facetious saying in legal circles about the ease with which prosecutors can secure indictments in grand jury cases: You can get a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.”
The legal aphorism has long been attributed to Sol Wachtler, former chief judge of New York’s Court of Appeals, based on a piece that appeared in the New York Daily News in January 1985. Mr. Wachtler told the paper that the state should scrap the grand jury system for bringing criminal indictments. The piece summarized his view, with brief quotes: “district attorneys now have so much influence on grand juries that ‘by and large’ they could get them to ‘indict a ham sandwich.’”
Mr. Wachtler became even more firmly linked to the saying two years later, when Tom Wolfe, a classmate of the judge at Washington and Lee University, credited him with the “ham sandwich” line in “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”
Having sat on a grand jury, the 95% is because it's a rigged system. The DA has to convinces 50% of the people that there is a 50% chance that their one sided story is possibly true. This is a lower bar than individuals are held to at cocktail parties.
So it may not be great, but what’s the alternative? The prosecutor decides independently when to bring charges? Is that better? It just seems to skip a step.
My understanding is that a panel of judges outperform grand juries, and petit juries in nearly every scenario. Sorry I don't have references on hand to support this.
I currently think the main benefit of juries is to educate the public on how screwed up the whole process is. It was a waste of time in terms of protecting anyone involved, but brought my trust in the criminal judicial system to an all time low.
Many US states use judges instead of grand juries. Many countries use panels of two "citizen judges" (lay persons who serve for a single term) and one career judge.
Having served on a grand jury, one of the first things we did was delegate the management of documents (including subpoenas) to the court staff. We didn't issue our own subpoenas; that would have been thousands of documents we didn't have the time to manage.
> Grand juries historically result in a 95%+ chance of indictment so this isn't a fishing expedition.
There were cases presented to us which did not result in any indictment vote as new information was discovered or persons involved made deals with the prosecutors. The prosecutors didn't have us vote on things they weren't sure about, but that doesn't mean they never made mistakes.
> They deal specifically with crimes that involve international transport. So this is human trafficking, drug smuggling, money mules, etc.
So Signal is being used for human trafficking? And they are deliberately making it easy to do that kind of activity on Signal without law enforcement knowing? Sounds like the app stores should ban them and AWS should kick them off.
I disagree with the above sentiment, but I think end to end encryption apps will be treated like that in the near future.
They deal specifically with crimes that involve international transport. So this is human trafficking, drug smuggling, money mules, etc.
To be honest the rest of it is just standard "we have some phone numbers" boilerplate. Same thing was probably sent to Facebook, Twitter, etc. with the hopes that someone was dumb enough to login and check their messages from a burner phone.
Edit: Rereading it, this is a grand jury. They likely already know the who, what, why, and how. Signal's response will go to support other evidence that they may have recovered from cell phones or cell network. Grand juries historically result in a 95%+ chance of indictment so this isn't a fishing expedition.