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Comment by oconnore | Hacker News Reader

If you care enough to post canaries, shouldn't you also care enough to just close shop instead of subtly telling your users to stop using your services?

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I'd imagine that since lavabit NSLs make that harder if not illegal.

its not within legal purview to force someone to continue doing something, is it?

But they could order them to give them access to administer their servers, with acts of sabotage being punishable. There's no reason you should assume that the people running RiseUp right now are the same people that ran it a week ago.

Even if you shut down immediately (more on that in a moment), you can't wipe your storage and The State can still look through that

And if it is an ongoing investigation, shutting down immediately may be very difficult. Unless you can make a compelling case that you were already doing so for whatever reason, it is a very clear textbook case of obstruction of justice/interfering with an ongoing investigation.

Or at least care enough to update them more than once a quarter... worse than useless, since those Unspeakable Agencies will have had their fill of information by then. And then the canary dies and people panic into moving their hosting to 'stay private'.

They just tweeted that they have no plans of doing so

https://twitter.com/riseupnet/status/800815181190217729

which means either they haven't received anything, in which case why not update the canary. That the orders were very limited in scope and they think they could keep operating safely. Or that they have been ordered not to shut down. Ambiguous tweet is ambiguous, though it's telling that they made it and still did not update the canary.

You mean like CryptoStorm's famous `Privacy Seppuku` pledge? https://cryptostorm.is/seppuku.html

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