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Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries

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Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries

#11

Post by chki »

sixhobbits wrote: post #5

unpopular opinion: the main point of these canaries is PR. As far as I understand (and I understand nearly nothing about US law, so pinch of salt blah blah), exploiting legal loopholes is something that makes people excited and talk about your product, but doesn't really change anything in a court. If you assume the US govt is an adversary or potential adversary, and you assume that they are fairly powerful through d…

But isn't the primary point of the canaries to give people the information that the government has been requesting some sort of information? A secondary point would be that this might prevent the government from doing so in the first place.

Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries

#12

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #8

>has never terminated a customer or taken down content due to political pressure https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ No comment on whether or not the termination was justified.

> Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion.

By political pressure they mean pressure from a political entity, that is, a government. That's what I'm assuming anyways, I'd love for a Cloudflare representative to confirm.

Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries

#13

Post by netsec_burn »

> Cloudflare has never modified the intended destination of DNS responses at the request of law enforcement or another third party.

Didn't they modify the DNS responses of mit.edu to point back to MIT (during the 2013 domain hijack incident)? This canary seems a bit ambiguous.

Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries

#14

Post by O5vYtytb »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #8

>has never terminated a customer or taken down content due to political pressure https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ No comment on whether or not the termination was justified.

Maybe it should read "external political pressure"?

Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries

#15

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jaredwiener wrote: post #2

Potentially naive question, but genuinely curious. How does someone know if a warrant canary has been "abandoned," as the article mentions, or used as intended? If they disappear, that indicates something. If they stay there without change, that indicates something too. Or am I missing something?

IIRC a while ago there was something like a canary for whether Julian Assange is still alive, with a message indicating it has to be updated every x period of time; it was not updated for an x amount of time. Wikileaks' governance has been questioned for a long time due to glitches like that. Same with a set of keys for encrypted data files.

Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries

#16

Post by robertcope »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #12
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #8

>has never terminated a customer or taken down content due to political pressure https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ No comment on whether or not the termination was justified.

> Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. By political pressure they mean pressure from a political entity, that is, a government. That's what I'm assuming anyways, I'd love for a Cloudflare representative to confirm.

"The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology." Seems pretty clear to me?

Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries

#17

Post by vonmoltke »

chki wrote: post #11
sixhobbits wrote: post #5

unpopular opinion: the main point of these canaries is PR. As far as I understand (and I understand nearly nothing about US law, so pinch of salt blah blah), exploiting legal loopholes is something that makes people excited and talk about your product, but doesn't really change anything in a court. If you assume the US govt is an adversary or potential adversary, and you assume that they are fairly powerful through d…

But isn't the primary point of the canaries to give people the information that the government has been requesting some sort of information? A secondary point would be that this might prevent the government from doing so in the first place.

If the government has declared that giving people such information is illegal, it doesn't matter how that information is conveyed.

Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries

#18

Post by blattimwind »

rhema wrote: post #7

>has never installed any law enforcement software or equipment anywhere on our network; Is the NSA a law enforcement agency? Does looking the other way while an agency installs it count? Can you really know if the hardware you get has not been tampered with by a government agency? I'm not sure how any company could assure me about these issues.

I don't think the NSA is a LEA, but it does have its own small police unit.

Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries

#19

Post by close04 »

rhema wrote: post #7

>has never installed any law enforcement software or equipment anywhere on our network; Is the NSA a law enforcement agency? Does looking the other way while an agency installs it count? Can you really know if the hardware you get has not been tampered with by a government agency? I'm not sure how any company could assure me about these issues.

> the hardware you get has not been tampered with

The warrant canary protects against warrants that come with a gag order preventing anyone from informing the public. Being hacked does not fall into that category. If such a hack is discovered there's no legal means to block them from publicly disclosing it. While the hack may be done with a warrant, the company would never get the gag order.

What I wonder is how enforceable are these in court. I remember reading that the chances of successfully defending a canary are slim to none but can't find any reference now. The reason was that while the law can't force you to lie it does prevent you from disclosing the existence of the warrant in any way. So you wouldn't be punished for lying but rather for having the mechanism there in the first place.

Is there a way to know if a canary was taken down because the company tried to avoid testing this in court or a warrant was actually issued?

Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries

#20

Post by mrguyorama »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #8

>has never terminated a customer or taken down content due to political pressure https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ No comment on whether or not the termination was justified.

I am hesitant to conflate actual neo-nazis with actual politics
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