Rsync.net Warrant Canary (2006) | Hacker News Reader

Rsync.net Warrant Canary (2006)

rsync.net

40 pointsrsync50 comments

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

I don't see the usefulness. You can sign a lie cryptographically just as well as a fact.

The government isn't allowed to force you to lie; they can force you to be silent. By updating this regularly it then becomes apparent when you have been forced into silence.

"The government isn't allowed to force you to lie"

Is that actually the case?

There are variety of careers and situations where falsehoods are encouraged and necessary.

For sure. But there's (potentially) a difference between being employed by the government in a role that requires lying and being forced as an ordinary citizen to lie. That said, I don't actually know about anything that prevents the latter.

If I set up a contract with you saying that I will not submit to any government subpoenas, and then the government subpoenas me, can I refuse, because "the government cannot force you to break contracts?" (The answer is No.)

If you want to practice civil disobedience, do it, and be straightforward about it. If Rsync.net were really to try to exercise this silly clause, it would be a giant distraction from what I presume is their actual complaint.

I more or less agree with the second half of your post.

Regarding the first part, I've seen a couple places the claim that the government can't force people to lie - I don't know of any support for this, but also haven't conclusively heard that it's not the case (certainly not from a lawyer). I'm highly skeptical, but wanting to know what support the people claiming this think they have. The fact that you can name another potential constraint that doesn't hold is irrelevant, isn't it?

> The government isn't allowed to

Argument lost right there.

As a UK resident my government is not legally permitted to take part in, or knowingly allow to occur on its territory, anything like "extraordinary rendition". "isn't allowed" made no difference in that case (and many other examples can be referenced for other governments including those of America) so we can't really expect it to in this or any other future case either.

If it's legitimately the case that the government isn't allowed to compel you to lie, then they will have a harder time punishing noncompliance, which is significant.

I know that the Government can force you to lie already - If you're American, go look at your milk container.

It will likely say something like "No rBST Artificial Hormones" and next to it it will say "No significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rbST-treated and non-rbST-treated cows."

That label is government mandated, and by law can't even be prefaced with something like "The following is Government mandated" or "We're forced to say."

This is a lie, because other parts of the government (not the FDA) have found material differences in the milk between untreated/treated cows.

i always thought something like this should be on there:

"Product contains rBST - an artificial growth hormone banned from human consumption in the EU and other countries"

Can you cite any statutory or legal authority that states this? Because it strikes me as in the same vein as "a police officer has to tell you they're a member of the police"

They don't have to force you into silence, they can force you thru duress not to be silent. All that is needed is some sort of incentive or leverage. (Keep up the good work citizen or ...)

If the actual system is robust enough to be a "dead-man" switch then you have to plan for "false positives/negatives" and have more than one person involved in the process in case of emergencies. This increases your social attack surface. Two people might be trusted if one is dead and didn't leave any evidence behind.

True, rsync.net state as much at the bottom of the page: "This scheme is not infallible. Although signing the declaration makes it impossible for a third party to produce arbitrary declarations, it does not prevent them from using force to coerce rsync.net to produce false declarations."

If you put a gun to your own head by setting up a situation where you will have to lie to your customers in order to comply with a court order, you aren't likely to get much sympathy.

You can find these specific requirements for secrecy onerous and undemocratic, and I might even agree with you. But these "I'm not really violating the law" posts by non-lawyer geeks are boring. There are all sorts of reasons society can demand you not to make certain communications. If you stop communicating to make the communication, you are still doing the communication in violation of the law.

Instead of the somewhat fuzzy method of dating via news, couldn't they combine this approach with that recommended by Errata Security to use bitcoin as a public ledger? http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2013/05/bitcoin-is-public-ledg...

Not everyone loves or wants any involvement with bitcoin

The same could be said for PGP/GPG but that doesn't mean it couldn't be made useful for purposes like this.

There are many thins that could be useful as a way of proving date or making a mark on a public ledger. Shall we list all of them?

You used bitcoin as an example because of your fanboyism. In no way is it obvious to use a currency or it's surrounding infrastructure for this (non intended) purpose.

> You used bitcoin as an example because of your fanboyism.

Actually, I didn't. Next time you attack someone, make sure it's the right person. Dick.

Dating with news can be somewhat fuzzy, which is why we always take our news from the financial press, and attempt to datestamp with "material" information ... that is to say, news with a very high monetary value that the market is racing to receive.

You could (conceivably) make up plausible future stories, but not things like quarterly results, lawsuit outcomes, etc.

Another good source of fixed-in-the-past yet unpredictable data is the closing price of a collection of stocks from the previous day. This would make verification easier to automate.

Easy to automate might not be the best goal for a system like this :)

I can't remember which show, but I remember watching a TV mystery with a picture of someone reading a newspaper as proof of someone being present on a certain day. Trouble was, the editor of the paper was in on the scam and ensured the headline would appear that day.

It seems easier to verify news than a bitcoin transaction. I'd have no idea how to go about doing that.

Feds: "Continue to update the canary or you disclosed the secret warrant and we throw you in prison."

Yes, but note that this is updated not just on our website, but on the storage arrays themselves - some of which are in Zurich and Hong Kong.

So the above scenario is a possibility, but then imagine the followup:

Feds to Zurich Canton: Tell swiss national X to update the warrant canary or ...

We have it spread out geographically for a reason.

If one government were to come knocking, could they order you to lie to other arms of your own business, so that they continue to update the canary because they don't know that a warrant was served?

Perhaps that's impractical, but I'm thinking about what would be needed to 'beat' the warrant canary system.

The storage arrays' access could be limited such that administrative accounts can only be used locally at a datacenter. Then, acting on the warrant would require telling an employee in Zurich to conduct any necessary action.

You'll be forced to tell your overseas colleagues that you have received no such warrants, and they should update the canary to reflect that. Unless your architecture is set up so they would somehow immediately become aware of these warrants, there's no way they're even going to know they exist.

Legal "hacks" like this rarely work.

Do you have any examples of them not working?

Well, the first thing I could think of was this gem: http://www.loweringthebar.net/2013/01/can-you-carpool-with-a...

Not the most perfect example, but it goes to show what happens when someone unfamiliar with the law makes "logical" (to them) assumptions about loopholes that exist. That blog is a treasure trove of gems like the above.

Courts tend to look at results.

If you have been ordered not to communicate X, and you communicate X, then you are in violation of whatever statute or court order was in place.

You might want to have your legal counsel look at the various reported cases involving asset protection trusts in the Cook Islands. In a situation such as yours I can easily see you cooling your heels in Federal prison on contempt of court charges. Your defense ("I cannot be held in contempt because it is impossible for me to comply" or perhaps "I told them to do it, but you know those silly Swiss, they ignored me") is unlikely to make a District Court judge happy. And I'm talking about REAL judges in REAL courts. I'm not talking about this Star Chamber bullshit that we live with now in the Land of the Free.

But you've probably looked at this and decided it is defensible.

How do I check the canary on a storage array?

As discussed in a previous HN thread, the courts might still see this as a notice that a warrant has been served, despite it being "said through not saying."

Has rsync.net had the opportunity to see these arguments play out?

I really doubt this would play out well in court. As said before, judges take a dim view of legal "tricks" like this.

They won't be sympathetic to you putting yourself in a quandary where you're essentially requiring yourself to issue false statements. The order they issue will force you to update the canary, as refusing to would disclose the existence of the warrant.

Yes, but at the very least it elevates the process out of a simple rubber stamp court order. One way or another, we'd get our "day in court", even if you never hear about it, and that's worth something.

We are more optimistic about how such things would play out, but even in that worst case scenario, there's some value in slowing things down and forcing that review.

I don't think we know enough about how the FISC works to jump to that conclusion. I'd say let us know how it works out, but...

Could you revoke the public key used to sign these messages (i.e. publish revocation cert to keyservers) when you get a warrant served? That way they won't be able to force you to sign anything with that key anymore, all you can do is create a new key, but the timestamp on that key will make it obvious that something happened on that day.

Or you could just publish a notification that you got a warrant. Yes, it's forbidden, but if the court has anything approaching smarts (and most do, actually) it's not any more forbidden than what you're suggesting and equally irrevocable.

No, we haven't, and that was the reasoning behind the canary being posted on the individual storage arrays (not just individual foreign locations, but each individual storage array).

As of today, I know of no other firm running a warrant canary, and I don't think any of the librarians[1] were ever challenged with theirs. As with all of this, it is uncharted.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

I think you should try to come up with a url convention that other sites can adopt similar to /favicon.ico

This is too deep to be followed: /resources/notices/canary.txt

What about something like /warrant-canary.txt ?

It's a neat idea, but you'd still need to trust rsync.net. If you start with the assumption that you cannot ever trust them, then you can use them(if needed) as a 3rd party storage site for encrypted files.

You could become a lifelogger and have a realtime webcam that shows you reading incoming mail.

"Attention! Today we have received no secret warrants cough cough

wink wink"

Why is there a 2006 date in the title?

This document was first published in 2006. We've been operating the warrant canary for just over 7 years now.

Wow, that's impressive. I'm surprised that date is not mentioned on the notice page (or on wikipedia).

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