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Comment by fish44 | Hacker News Reader

Great - can we replace it with a crow if it was the USA, a budgie if it was EU. a magpie if it was Israel, a woodpecker if it was China (etc)

Green if it was tax organisation and yellow if is a criminal one

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The idea behind a canary is while they can tell you to keep it confidential, they can't compel your speech to lie and say you've never cooperated. Adding a wink wink nod nod code word defeats the idea.

Isn't saying "You can't talk about this" compelling speech? Why can the courts say "You can't talk about this" legally, but can't say "You can't update your warrant canary"?

Because, in the United States, you have a constitutional right not to be compelled to say something you don't want to, but you don't have the constitutional right to say whatever you want to, especially in the case of a gag order regarding an active investigation or trial.

So if you go ahead and say "I haven't be served a warrant by X group" on your website, the government can stop you from saying the contrary, but they can't force you to lie about it, so you are free to remove the canary since it is no longer true.

If the courts ever tried to retaliate against that, they'd run into a mountain of precedent that forbids compelled speech. They would have to argue that you are required to lie, rather than be allowed to retract a non-truth. That's not something the Constitution is going to allow.

So, it goes like this? If I have been served a warrant with a gag order:

If someone asks me "Have you been served a warrant with a gag order?" - I'm allowed to say "No", and lie about it if I want to. I am not allowed to say "Yes", per the gag order.

Now, if someone asks me: "have you been served a warrant with a gag order? Say no if the answer is no, but say nothing is the answer is yes". Now, I am allowed to say no, and allowed to say nothing, even though by saying nothing it directly contradicts the point of the gag order? Is it really the case that these gag orders are meaningless if someone just asks the question in the right manner?

I can't really buy that. I suspect canary warrants only "work" because they have never been tested in court yet.

Expiring signatures... No one can force you (legally) to renew the signature.

I suspect a judge could compel you to do so, in the same sense that they can compel you to not divulge that you received a warrant.

But, I guess we won't really know until a warrant canary event makes its way to the courts.

a judge can compel you to do cryptographic math in your head after you have forgotten the private key? the entirety of reaching into peoples minds with law is nonsense

Well, a judge kept Tommy Thompson in jail for 7+ years on contempt of court charges after the court asked Tommy to product some gold ingots and he "forgot" where they were.

>If someone asks me "Have you been served a warrant with a gag order?" - I'm allowed to say "No", and lie about it if I want to. I am not allowed to say "Yes", per the gag order.

>Now, if someone asks me: "have you been served a warrant with a gag order? Say no if the answer is no, but say nothing is the answer is yes". Now, I am allowed to say no, and allowed to say nothing, even though by saying nothing it directly contradicts the point of the gag order? Is it really the case that these gag orders are meaningless if someone just asks the question in the right manner?

It isn't about asking or answering questions. Let's say I light a fire in my firepit each morning that I haven't been served with a secret warrant. The day after I'm served, I simply don't light it. Anyone watching the firepit then knows that I've been served. Nobody is asking me anything, and I'm not saying anything. The government can compel you to stay silent due to a gag order, but they cannot compel you to trudge out every morning to light the firepit.

The other half is that the canary is broad, and doesn't specify which government or agency made the request / gag order.

The "I didn't really talk about it, I just didn't NOT say I WASN'T talking about it" thing feels like a flimsy technicality. I think what's really protecting these canaries is that they're non-specific and one-time-only.

I don't think we're going to see many "I have not been gagged by the CIA on April 25, 2024" canaries going around, even though that technically uses the same loophole.

As I understand it warrant canaries are controversial in the legal community or at least were last I looked. Some of the questions you are exactly what they've asked. I don't know if any of the theories have been properly tested in courts yet.

I'd be extremely skeptical of anything you read in this thread about contentious signing, dates or whateever. There are a lot of amateur lawyers with amateur opinions in here. If you are interested in ever using one, find a lawyer and check with them first.

But whatever the legal consensus is, I doubt a git commit that says "NSA wuz here" fits in with it.

Technically even just removing a warrant canary immediately could put you at legal risk in the USA. The non-risky way is to update the canary $date every $timeperiod and then stop updating $date after an attack. That way nothing is changed to indicate but it still becomes obvious by lack of update after $timeperiod.

Yeah, that kind of irked me with the commit. Currently (769b306) it says:

> this commit removes a section of the footer as we have received a voluntary enquiry from a state authority that included a requirement for confidentiality

Which... is just saying what happened? Point is to remove it without saying anything, as if you do, you'd break the "requirement for confidentiality" and put yourself at risk.

Imagine complying with a gag order. That's one of the most blatant abuses of human rights.

It is. But when you're on the receiving end and the federal agents bust down your door and point firearms at you you see things a bit differently in the moment.

Agreed, but that's all the more reason to be louder and more defiant.

Not everyone wants to be a hero.

An hero

somehow it is hard to believe that this statement is made .. confidentiality and "gag orders" have ruled the business world for more than twenty years in the USA. Any executive of any public company (stocks) must demonstrate iron-clad compliance with these orders, every week of their employment. Asvmuch as anyone might agree with the aspirational poetry of this statement, it is literally ABCs of US dollar business that this is no joke. surely that is clear?

This isn't business. This is the government using secret violent force to keep you from telling others you've been (legally) robbed. It does not involve a voluntary contract that one enters into willingly in the open. These are very different things. Surely that is clear?

Exactly. This isn't a voluntary contract

One extreme (no demand on me is fair) or the other (every action by government must be obeyed) .. neither of those..

I agree that it is not a contract between equals, it is an action of law in government; like it or not it is the price of civilization. In the USA the basis of law has been worked out very well, in some cases. Of course there are abuses and no one is defending an abuse of the law. Humans are social and difficult. The answer lies in a system of review and an ability to change over time.

A voluntary enquiry with a gag order? I mean, I suppose in principle there's no reason such a thing wouldn't be possible, but it feels like a bit of an edge case.

I'm trying to think to myself if I was running a project and had a canary, what would be the threshold to kill the canary on a voluntary enquiry.

If it was CIA and they sent me: "Please give us all information on XYZ so that we can organize an assassination on them. This is voluntary and you don't have to give us that information. This is just pretty please."

I think I would kill my canary even if the request is technically voluntary and I wasn't compelled to give out any information. But that was a joke scenario because I couldn't come up with more realistic scenarios.

And then I guess if your threshold is too low, you'll kill your canary on something that might be a nothingburger.

I don't think the CIA exactly sends you a note asking for data to be dropped off at their Google Drive. It is more likely you receive an offer to license data you have from a company that is relatively obscure with a financial incentive.

You kind of lose plausible deniability with that granularity, I'd guess.

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