Why not give each user or account on a given service their own warranty canary?
Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries
131–140 of 163 posts
Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries
#132Could a company create a warrant canary for every user? Just a simple notice when you login to your account? If the premise of the canary is that they can force you to keep silent but can't compel you to speak, what would prevent a company from doing this?
I've heard that Google asks you re-sign ToS if there's been a request by authorities to access your email account.
Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think it would be forced directly. I think they’d put the company under a gag with threat of criminal punishment if they do anything to “signal” an investigation. Then an operator has to ask themself “is it worth risking jail time by updating this page?”
The appeal of the Warrant Canary design is that the operator simply has to take no action (i.e. not update the page) to signal that they've been contacted by law enforcement, in theory making it safer. It's still a risk though.
Taking no action can be illegal, as child neglect and negligent homicide demonstrate.
Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries
#134Could a company create a warrant canary for every user? Just a simple notice when you login to your account? If the premise of the canary is that they can force you to keep silent but can't compel you to speak, what would prevent a company from doing this?
I've heard that Google asks you re-sign ToS if there's been a request by authorities to access your email account.
That sounds urban legend-y, and it seems like you'd get an insane number of false positives every time something like GDPR rolls around.
Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries
#135Would a central source for warrant canaries be helpful? Like one place where you can find all those individual warrant canaries from companies you care about...
https://canarywatch.org/ does essentially this.
Crap: just noticed they stopped updating it.
Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can you elaborate as to how a compelled untruthful (electronic) declaration for the purpose of continuing to obtain sales of your product is NOT (wire) fraud? I'm saying—and I said this expressly in the post you responded to—that that isn't the purpose, which is the strongest reason it isn't criminal fraud. Your initial purpose in the warrant canary was sales, sure, but the government wasn't involved in that and it…
Your compliance with that order is not for that purpose. HOWEVER, your statement which was originally to generate sales went from being truthful to being untruthful. So now that your warrant canary is false, you are making an untruthful statement supporting sales generation for your company, which is what makes it fraudulent; and in my mind at least, because you've been compelled to do so, that's conspiracy to commit…
[deleted]
Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can you elaborate as to how a compelled untruthful (electronic) declaration for the purpose of continuing to obtain sales of your product is NOT (wire) fraud? I'm saying—and I said this expressly in the post you responded to—that that isn't the purpose, which is the strongest reason it isn't criminal fraud. Your initial purpose in the warrant canary was sales, sure, but the government wasn't involved in that and it…
Your compliance with that order is not for that purpose. HOWEVER, your statement which was originally to generate sales went from being truthful to being untruthful. So now that your warrant canary is false, you are making an untruthful statement supporting sales generation for your company, which is what makes it fraudulent; and in my mind at least, because you've been compelled to do so, that's conspiracy to commit…
According to this argument, it seems like you don't even need a warrant canary. If you told your customers you would inform them of a warrant, and the government compelled you not to, under your arguments wouldn't that also be conspiracy to commit fraud?
Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
I worked for Cloudflare when this happened, and this is the correct answer.
Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Often, the law does treat action and inaction very differently. Eg: it’s illegal to poison your ailing grandparent, but legal to let them die by removing the feeding tube (because you are just “not feeding them anymore”).
Intent and spirit of the law matter more than the difference between action and inaction.
The law doesn’t care if you say “let’s put him out of his misery” before pulling out the feeding tube, even though it demonstrates a clear intent to kill.
Re: Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries
#140This is the most boring article i've ever read in my life.
How the hell did it get 200+ upvotes...