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

[Troy Benjegerdes]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 10:26:25AM +0100, Alfie John wrote:
> 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.

There is another option. First you get some idealistic laywers who are 
stuck with half a million in student loans they can't pay back and work
out a warrant canary system and pay them equity in the company that 
will deploy it as a retainer.

However, for this to work it requires **investors** and end users to buy
the product(s) the company is going to sell that have warrant canaries.

You might even be able to work out some sort of 'proof-of-retainer' block
reward scheme on a new canarycoin so the lawyers defending the company 
can get tradeable coins, and cash them out to pay off the loans.

All of this revolves around the business models. Figure that out and the 
legal jurisdiction is irrelevant, because if you have a good enough business
model, you can buy the legislation you want.