My thinking, when I first proposed what are now called Warrant
   Canaries, was to rely on the U.S. constitutional protection against ex
   post facto. In the same way that you can never know what laws might
   someday be passed which could criminalize current, lawful, behavior or
   speech, a service can never know in advance if they might someday
   receive a warrant or NSL. Can someone be compelled to refrain from free
   speech because someday that speech might be prohibited? If more than
   one person is engaged in the creation or publication of a Warrant
   Canary could it be viewed as a conspiracy? Can someone be compelled to
   speak falsities under court order?
   Until there are prosecutions which reach high enough in the Federal
   courts we may not know.
   Steve
   On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 8:32 AM, Stephen D. Williams <[1]sdw@lig.net>
   wrote:

   On 4/1/15 5:26 AM, Andrew wrote:

Alfie John:

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015, at 10:01 AM, Steven Schear wrote:

Looks like Australia has banned use of my idea.

[2]http://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/australia-outlaws-warrant-cana.html

If its true that a man's status can be measured by his enemies.. then
I've taken a position at the top of the cypherpunks heap :)

How about the reverse? As the point of canaries is to let people know a
warrant is in place while thinking that you're not breaking any laws by
telling them (good luck), hypothetically why not just be up front and
tell people that a warrant is in place via a tor and a hidden service
(let's call it WarrantWatch). Each post is a message from an admin of a
website saying that a warrant is in place, with the message being signed
via the website's TLS private key for verification.

Alfie


So, you're suggesting that instead of going into a legal 'gray area',
website operators should simply obviously violate the law and then
publish a non-repudiable cryptographic proof of their lawbreaking.

Am I missing something here?  Is the idea to get everyone flouting the
law and thereby render it ineffectual, or is it just April Fools?

Andrew

   The point of a warrant canary is to communicate in a legal way
   something that is illegal for you to communicate directly.  That
   involves something like setting laws against each other in some
   prioritized way or otherwise splitting hairs so that no one can
   technically be prosecuted.  It is a bit of a legal arms race.
   You have to find something you cannot be compelled to do or not do.  A
   dead man's switch of some kind where not doing something is ambiguous
   and unassailable.  Can you be required by law to go to Starbucks every
   morning?  To report or not report on Facebook something factual, like
   you ate Wheaties that morning?  You have a headache?  Something that is
   protected by a higher priority law, although if the First Amendment is
   trumped by these laws that's going to be difficult.  Perhaps a group of
   people probabilistically do or not do something, but any evidence of
   collusion would be a problem so they would have to act independently.
   Some mechanism that relies on someone's thoughts might be sacrosanct.
   Visual dwell, polygraph (not that they work at all), etc.
   Perhaps every day someone proposes that the warrant canary has
   triggered, and every day but one someone objects.
   Is there or is there not a way to do this legally?  That seems like a
   gray area, if the First Amendment is trumped, along with other legal
   protections that could apply.
   If there is no way to do this legally, what are the ways to dilute the
   situation as to be effectively legal, i.e. prosecution would be
   unlikely or ineffective?
   Since the First Amendment is strained here, reasonable people could
   conclude that the conflicting law is unconstitutional.  That could lead
   to a sense of responsibility to do the right thing.
   sdw

References

   1. mailto:sdw@lig.net
   2. http://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/australia-outlaws-warrant-cana.html