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

[Alfie John]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2014, at 12:35 AM, coderman wrote:
> 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.

I think that there are a number of companies who would like to use a
warrant canary to protect their users but also do not want to be a
guinea pig of the courts. Even Apple, which had the biggest market cap
in the world so could afford to take on this fight, bowed down and
removed their warrant canary recently.

Sadly, until someone with a set of big brass ones goes all guns blazing
to specifically set precedent, everyone is going to sit on the sidelines
on this issue.

I guess the only real work around would be to relocate the company
(including all employees) to a more friendly jurisdiction.

Alfie

-- 
  Alfie John
  alfiej at fastmail.fm