Fwd: [whispersystems] Warrant Canary - Gag order in place right now?

coderman coderman@gmail.com
Thu Oct 16 16:35:44 PDT 2014


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Moxie Marlinspike <moxie@thoughtcrime.org>
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 16:27:04 -0700
Subject: Re: [whispersystems] Warrant Canary - Gag order in place right now?
To: whispersystems@lists.riseup.net


On 10/16/2014 03:13 PM, Advocatus Diaboli wrote:
> I've been watching the development of TextSecure and other OWS apps for
> a while, and among other things wondered why there is no warrant canary.
>
> 20 Minutes ago, a comment was posted in the following issue - and
> promptly deleted again 5 Minutes ago:

As far as I can tell, nothing was deleted, you're just looking at the
wrong issue:

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/whispersystems.org/issues/34

> It has been deleted by either the author or an OWS administrator. It
> stated that, unlike moxie says in the issue, the EFF's lawyers obviously
> are of the opinion that warrant canarys do work:

There's a huge difference between the EFF taking a public position on an
untested legal concept and a lawyer providing council to a client.  Of
course the EFF is going to advocate them, their job is to take that
position.

Whether warrant canaries will work or not is not my area of expertise.
However, I don't want to experiment with them for two reasons:

1) Lawyers who provide us council have told us it's very likely they
won't work.  I don't want to advertise something that could be
interpreted as an assurance which is actually false if for some reason
it ever came down to that.

2) It's not the hill I want to die on.  We're not well positioned to
push the state of the art in legal policy or to be a test case.  It's
not what we're good at, and honestly the point of our work is to make
those kind of questions irrelevant by not having any data to provide.
That's the envelope that we *are* interested in pushing.

> If this would be the case, they should not to put up a warrant canary
> (because it would be lying), and they would also not be able to explain
> why they cannot publish a warrant canary (because that would violate the
> gag order). The only thing left do would be to find excuses why no
> warrant canary is being put up and trying to avoid public attention to
> the topic. Which is exactly what's happening.

You left out the part about the lizard people.

> So please, Moxie, if this is *not* the case, state on this mailinglist,
> publicly and in clear terms, that OWS or the server admins did not yet
> receive a subpoena / warrant / gag order related to any OWS app or service.

We have never received a subpoena, warrant, or gag order related to any
OWS app or service.  Now can we go back to writing software?

- moxie

-- 
http://www.thoughtcrime.org



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