Government Requests » Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (again!)

Signal is designed to hold as close to no data as possible about its users. Your messages, calls, contacts, groups, profile name and avatar, stories, and stickers are end-to-end encrypted. Much of the other metadata other services log by default is never collected at all. We cannot turn over information that we never had access to in the first place, and end-to-end encryption is the standard way of doing things here at Signal. Seven months after we published our last one, another grand jury subpoena recently reached us from the same court in the District of Columbia.

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On October 5, 2026, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia issued a grand jury subpoena seeking “all customer or subscriber account information” for four phone numbers over a specified period. It gave us three days to respond. The attachment said the records sought “include, but are not limited to” two items: account creation date and time, and last connection date and time. Like we mentioned last time, it is encouraging to see requests to Signal increasingly being narrowly tailored to the very limited information we do collect rather than the broad requests we used to receive in the past. This showcases a growing awareness in the law enforcement community of the limited information that is available from us via legal processes.

The standard production instructions attached to the subpoena, evidently written with banks in mind rather than Signal, also asked for images of checks and deposit slips. We don’t have those details to share, as we do not collect them as a part of providing our service in a way that can be linked to a Signal account.

The ACLU responded on our behalf on October 6, one day after the subpoena was issued. Our response was predictably brief as out of the four accounts for which information was sought, three did not exist. For the remaining one account, we provided the account creation date and time and the date of its last connection to Signal servers. Since we retain the date of an account’s last connection, not the time, we could only share the information we had available on that front.

Unlike the previous subpoena from this court, this one did not come with a nondisclosure order. Transparency is our default, so we’re publishing the documents now, with redactions covering the phone numbers, the time period, and the identities of government personnel and after giving the government sufficient notice of our intentions.

We’re grateful to the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented Signal in responding to this subpoena, and especially to Brett Max Kaufman and Laura Moraff for turning around a response within a few days.

Our commitment to everyone who uses Signal remains the same. We’ll keep engaging with such requests alongside the ACLU, and we’ll keep working to publish the ones we’re compelled to answer on our blog.

The relevant documents for this request can be found below.

Grand jury subpoena

Our response