Can the government presently compel a bank not to offer super-secure highly drill resistant safe deposit boxes?
Signal by Whisper Systems is intended to work in such a way that a subpoena for someone's chat logs would be useless because there's nothing useful to subpoena. They cannot access the keys necessary to decrypt.
Assume for the sake of argument that they've achieved their goal from a technical standpoint. As a result they are unable to comply with subsection (a); they cannot provide the unencrypted information, and no amount of technical assistance on their behalf would allow them to do so.
Section 3. (c) "License Distributors" would appear to prohibit Apple from making the app available in its app store.
If the FBI can legally compel Apple to produce a backdoored firmware for their phones, they can also compel Open Whisper Systems to produce a backdoored version of the Signal app to intercept all plaintext on the client side. Since almost everybody has automatic updates turned on, they won't even need to find a way to push the rogue version to the target's device.
Every service that relies on a vendor-provided app is open to this kind of "technical assistance". Ditto for any webapp that relies on vendor-provided JavaScript crypto libraries. The vendor can "technically assist" themselves at any time to gain surveillance capabilities they previously did not have.
Signal by Whisper Systems is intended to work in such a way that a subpoena for someone's chat logs would be useless because there's nothing useful to subpoena. They cannot access the keys necessary to decrypt.
Assume for the sake of argument that they've achieved their goal from a technical standpoint. As a result they are unable to comply with subsection (a); they cannot provide the unencrypted information, and no amount of technical assistance on their behalf would allow them to do so.
Section 3. (c) "License Distributors" would appear to prohibit Apple from making the app available in its app store.