Today The Intercept’s parent company, First Look Media, published a warrant “canary” — a statement that attempts to assure readers that the company has not been compelled to comply with a secret government order like a National Security Letter.
In addition to this, First Look is publishing AutoCanary: simple, free, open-source software to easily create and manage warrant canaries.
Our warrant canary lets the public know that we have not received a secret subpoena, warrant or other legal compulsion that we are prohibited from disclosing. In the event the company is issued such a legal process, our plan is to not renew the canary statement.
Gag orders can be issued to service providers to forbid them from informing users that their information has been requisitioned. For instance, in 2011, Google started a four-year legal battle with the U.S. government over a gag order which prevented the company from notifying members of Wikileaks that their emails were requested by the U.S. government.
While the government may be able to compel silence about legal processes through a gag order, it’s much more difficult to argue that it can compel a service provider to falsely state that it has not received legal process when, in fact, it has. The proposition behind a warrant canary is that you shouldn’t be forced to sign a document that you know to be untrue. Hence, if a National Security Letter or other gag order is served, the recipient would simply allow their canary to expire — to stop chirping, if you will — rather than sign a document that has become false.
In 2013, Apple became the best-known organization to publish a canary when it included such a statement in its transparency report. In 2014, it was reported that the canary statement was missing from Apple’s transparency reports covering July–December 2013 and January–June 2014. A variety of organizations have either published warrant canaries or included canary-style language in their transparency reports. A list of such organizations is kept on the Canary Watch website and includes Silent Circle, which makes software for encrypted phone calls; Tumblr, the blog publishing brand owned by Yahoo; the online community Reddit; the Medium publishing platform; Cloudflare, which accelerates the delivery of web content; and Pinterest, a product-centric social network.
To this date, First Look Media has not received any legal process that includes a gag order. Today, we publish our warrant canary affirming this for the month of April, 2015. Our canary will be updated on the first week of each month to cover the previous month. In order to simplify our process, we wrote AutoCanary, which you can download from our new First Look Code website.
There is no public record of a warrant canary ever being tested in court. You should consult a lawyer to discuss the benefits and hazards before you decide whether publishing a warrant canary is a good course for your service.
You should include some current headlines (from another site) to show that the canary wasn’t prepared in advance.
Ummm… I take it this means that nobody at TI is willing to go to jail for doing the right thing?
I mean, aren’t you admitting that you will comply if you are issued an NSL and everybody here could have to wait up to a month to learn about it?
Way to rage against the machine!!!
Or am I just misinterpreting the concept because I’m a bit grumpy tonight?
And, perhaps you could update this story with some context
I thought I read somewhere that 23,000 of these NSL’s were issued so far (or in one year, or something… yes, I’m too grumpy to do a search tonight).
So, wouldn’t that mean that canaries will never be chirping again for most major corporations who facilitate online communications? And since avoiding using one of those services is next to impossible, we have to live with the idea our privacy may have been compromised? I mean, cool that TI is safe, but there’s basically zero chance that the internet company I am using to see you site could qualify right?
A gag order is a violation of the right of free speech. That right is recognized in the US Constitution. So the actions of the government are clearly illegal.
You shouldn’t need to resort to clever stratagems in order to exercise a fundamental right. By doing so, you have already half acquiesced to tyranny.
Unless there is some other constitutional or legal obligation, mere software won’t work (or reault in contempt of court).
You neednto bind either self-incrimination, or something else legal under penty or perjury.
Else the court can compel you to swap a live canary.
Russian spy agencies were pretty big on the idea of ‘useless idiots’ during the cold war. Is it a stretch to suggest that even with the best intentions, everything can be used to create useless idiots?
So sad that it has come to this. Warrant canaries, and Jesus wept.
But I don’t give up hope for the future. Not sure what my role will be in that future but for now, I hunker down…I stop participating in the things that I can, stop playing ‘their’ game, stop mindlessly obsessing over the technology TPTB & corporations want me to use. I have no mortgage, no debts, almost ready to cut the cord entirely and life off grid…downsizing my job/income voluntarily such that I no longer produce tax revenue to fuel the beast.
Growing my own food, some farm animals, a nice creek burbling down the forest on the other side of the property. Wood i split and stack myself keeps me cozy warm when it rains or snows…Chipmunks and birds to feed…no traffic noises, cop sirens, or stench of the decaying city around me anymore….
Hey, its actually pretty pleasant to ‘turn on, tune in, & drop out’. Good luck peeps, hope your seats are in the upright and locked position…might get a little bumpy soon… :)
Famed journalist I.F. Stone was forced by long experience to observe, “All governments lie to their publics.” That they will use their power to force others to lie for them is a foregone conclusion. It is a felony to lie to any trivial government bureaucrat, not a crime to lie for them. This pressure comes from secret laws, secret courts and secret police, but it can also come via blackmail of journalists whose lives have been surveilled, or by those promised career boosting access. Everything you can imagine might be compromised via secret means, will surely be abused.
The intercept@firstlook.org IS the POLICE, ran by the police to document people stupid enough to believe that they represent freedom of the press. Don’t believe it,?,… Try to post a message here that contains actionable intelligence or information that helps the people.
The canary is supposed to be updated in the first week of every month. The period listed in the current canary is April 2015. It’s now getting on towards the end of May. Conclusion: First Look has been served. And just to make sure we all know it, they’ve written this article.
We can’t post May’s canary until the first week of June, because May isn’t over yet.
I breathlessly await the first week of June.
Micah, as a techie, let me suggest that you should really be using a continuous, ongoing, daily or merely static, warrant canary. A monthly one doesn’t really do anybody much good and leaves too much open to speculation if it did or didn’t post and why.
Why go monthly?
Funny. With all due respect but apparently unless I use this moniker I can’t get a thing posted. For weeks. This despite somehow getting malware on the piece of crap hardware I’d bought expressly for the purpose of posting here. It’s funny. You may say you want free speech, and you may say you want to advocate for software which enhances privacy, but you eschew tor, you eschew new posters, you eschew known IPs (proxy or not) and you basically have a completely disenchanting, disenfranchising commenting system that shows a strong bias, like it or not, to NOT enabling free speech.
I noticed a couple of other strident posters are gone much as well this week.
Of course it’d be ignorant to think that this site didn’t act, in some ways, like a watering hole, but putting that aside, I have a very important question for those of you who have any say there — and it is a philosophical one which touches, if not downright gropes, directly upon the subjects you seem to espouse and hold most dear —
namely, if people do NOT have a platform to actually debate this instead of making their way into the peanut gallery (note the name I used in the first place, not used elsewhere) — what happens to those who get frustrated trying to post? Are you not sort of creating the exact same sort of environment that encourages people to find alternate avenues to express themselves that could lead to far more strident or violent outcomes?
If you won’t allow the airing of opinions, and you claim to act for the people you write for and about, then who, pray tell, do those people turn to?
I managed to slide into some “you can post” zone before. Maybe I won’t with this post (which is to say I’m not on that piece of tossaway hardware and I have no idea how you’re pass/failing comments — it certainly isn’t based on IP).
And since I think it bears mentioning, as this will likely be my last post until some of this can be sorted out, as I’ve stated numerous times, the technical skills displayed here have been paltry (the encryption article for example). People have offered to help with the commenting system. Heck, I could even code a solution in an hour or so (but don’t try replying to this email, it never did work (at least not for me), so I assume others could as well. Hiring an intern to ONLY filter the obvious spam would also suffice (and I am quite sure you of all people could find a millennial willing to do this for free just for the resume fodder — certainly other publications with less import can).
At any rate, I’m not going to go out and buy new hardware. It was peculiar. And frankly I’m finding the echo chamber a bit of a bummer anyway. I’m not sure I’ll be missed, and I may be back intermittently, but for what it’s worth, I would appreciate a reply to this.
I’d also greatly appreciate you consider the suggestions I have mentioned REPEATEDLY, starting with dropping the hypocrisy about tor and commenting. You want people to be able to speak their mind. YOU advocate for tor (maybe not you, but this site exists in part because of it) — but you deny anybody who doesn’t want to risk being put on a list the right to post — and while it may not be a “right” per se, you seem to offhand indicate a level of hypocrisy that bothers me when it comes to asking for freedom of speech (even for those with, shall with say, problems), yet you let them on.
But I’ll repeat: If we are so stridently demanding ways to NOT have people basically radicalise, it may HELP TREMENDOUSLY to let people talk in a place where they feel they can make responsible and reasonable contact with others who feel as they do — or at least tell them they will never get posted. You’re contributing to the very extremist-veering culture you revile otherwise. If people cannot be accepted among an above-ground group, where, praytell, do THEY go? Do you not see the parallels?
I’m not speaking for me here. I’m speaking for what you’re probably going to cause, if you haven’t already. I don’t think you realise how important it is. Better to let ALL the comments through — even the batshit insane ones — and let things go as they will — if you must, add the up/down arrows which make sense (and for which there is free code available to leech from).
But stop contributing to the insanity of bullying other news sources when you are, at times, even more fascist than they are about commenting.
Now I guess to see if this will post.
As to those who do still stick around, check your devices. And keep up the good fight.
I need a break from this. I’ll be back at some point from a new/clean machine.
Please forgive my ignorance, but is this program used by someone or some entity who gets an NSL and wants to covertly yet overtly announce, by omision, that they have been served with an NSL, to those who might want to know that fact? Or is this program required, by those who want to know, in order to see the Canary?
Sounds like it’s for an organization which thinks it might get such an NSL. This seems to work by having a notice say, on a regular basis, that they haven’t had such a request. Then when they do, they no longer publish that notice. It’s premise seems to work by ommission so I don’t think it has applicability if you wait until you get one. And the ‘program’ isn’t necessary, you just have to schedule such a notice’ and remember to not publish it when and if the NSL arrives. The software discussed seems to just automate this but surely someone has to flip some switch if they get served.
Hope that helps, hope I have understood it correctly.
Were does one find the public key to verify the signature that the canary is signed with? I assumed it was signed by Lynn Oberlander but she does not have a public key listed on her profile.
Well-noted. The canary is signed with the ‘canary@firstlook.org’ key. You can find it on https://sks-keyservers.net/. The fingerprint is 91C0 C982 A41F 8D39 3953 1A71 FAB7 37F9 C5C1 CA80. The key signed by myself, Lynn Oberlander, Micah Lee, and Erinn Clark.
This seems like a beautifully written test case… if your goal is to get the Supreme Court to find a loophole to allow government compelled speech. When you turn a routine statement that a company might make into a regular scheduled reminder, where someone has to make a “binary decision” whether to sign or not to sign a pre-existing statement, it makes it a lot easier to muddy the waters and say that choosing not to sign was “really” making a speech, with the intent to have the knowledge heard.
I don’t get it. Why not just “recognize the reality” that whoever overhears anything about a NSL is free to send whatever they know to Wikileaks? And use the canary only in a manual way, in actual text-based documents that are written by human beings.
Perhaps I should explain further with an analogy. Suppose you’ve received one of these NSLs, and you go to the world’s most prosecutable medium, i.e. Twitter, to make a comment. To say “We are not under surveillance” – safe. To say “We are under surveillance. NOT.” — well, I wouldn’t try it in Texas. To ‘Tweet’ “We are under surveillance” and then follow it by “Not” later on? Doubt it. And to ‘Tweet’ the first part, fully intending to follow up with the second, but then you forget? Not likely to meet with government approval.
Yet that is exactly what you do when you announce “if we don’t canary by tomorrow, we’re under surveillance”, and then you don’t canary tomorrow. You might as well argue in court that just because you wrote that “GET SMART is our code for we’re under surveillance” doesn’t mean that you can’t post about your favorite TV series the day after you’re served with the letter. And what court? Some secret court, with nobody watching who is going to tell. Yeah, I’m sure they’ll uphold your rights.
The whole thing reminds me of the time I saw a Usenet posting about “Assassination Politics”, and the libertarians were falling all over themselves trying to claim that this was a foolproof, unstoppable way for them to hire hitmen and the government couldn’t do anything about it. Well, we know how that turned out. But we won’t know how this turns out, because every argument I made will probably be made in some uncomfortable session the day before the canary is supposed to sing, and we’ll only see that it sings on time and in tune. Because the one thing that’s NEVER going to get anyone thrown in jail is to aid in NSA surveillance and lie about it.
Thanks for the well thought out comments.
I understand the point you’re making. This type of system is unlikely to be popular with law enforcement and there have indeed been genuine concerns about the rulings of secret courts. The tech industry has been battling to disclose the existence of so-called “FISA requests” and only won the right to do this in 2014; however, companies must wait six months to disclose the number of requests they receive, and can only do so as a range (such as “0-999?). Challenging a gag order in court is laborious and costly. It is part of this concern that has led to companies like Apple using warrant canary statements in order to alert users to the use of gag orders on large companies. While I can’t answer the underlying question regarding the efficacy of warrant canaries in court, Neil Richards, a law professor at Washington University said of Apple’s efforts:
“If it’s really committed to challenging the gag order, it has a ton of resources to apply, and they’re a good bet. Challenging the 215 gag is as much [a function] of resources and commitment as it is a tidy legal [question]. If they succeed, I’ll buy a Mac!”
As an aside, I’m not surprised that you’re reminded of ‘Assassination Politics’. The idea of negative pronouncements to thwart the non-disclosure requirements of court orders and served secret warrants was first proposed by Steven Schear on the cypherpunks mailing list (the same place that birthed Jim Bell’s novel and terrifying use of crypto currency that you mentioned). It was suggested for use by public libraries in 2002 in response to the USA Patriot Act. You can find the original post here: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/cypherpunks-lne-archive/conversations/topics/5869