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Rsync.net Warrant Canary

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Re: Rsync.net Warrant Canary

#31

Post by pavel_lishin »

bluefish wrote: post #9
dexen wrote: post #6

Looks like a pretty decent law hack to me; they are going to comply with the warrant and just not update a particular file anymore. Still, I assume a skilled lawyer would be able to convince a judge that the net effect is that users effectively obtain information about rsync.net being served a warrant quite closely around some specific date, and thus the service broke the law anyway (assuming secret warrants are lawf…

It would be an interesting legal case to say the least, especially because they do not indicate that they will provide further information about the warrant, or how to act other than individuals should "take special notice". Still I believe you are correct, by having a publicly stated policy about their planned inaction when served a secret warranty is effectively the same as making a public announcement. Ballsy, but…

It does seem like something that only works once. As soon as a warrant is served and they stop updating the file, when can they start updating it again? When the warrant is made public?

Re: Rsync.net Warrant Canary

#32

Post by jsteele »

benatkin wrote: post #30
defen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a joke - my point was that anyone who pays attention to politics would have known that the Democrats would emphasize her upbringing, and Republicans would express concerns about judicial activism.

That reminds me of a podcast by The Economist called "The Week Ahead", where each Friday they try to guess what the major news stories in the next week will be. I agree with you that they could have found a story that would have been harder to guess. http://video.economist.com/index.jsp?fr_chl=157a3251a697e23e...

I hate to belabor the point, and I'm pretty sure you get it anyway, but it's not the general subject or tone of the story that matters, it's the exact wording, which would be very hard to guess, especially for longer excerpts. It's not a matter of finding a "story" that's hard to guess, it's a matter of finding exact wording. I'll guess there's going to be some kind of trouble with the space shuttle next week, but that doesn't help defeat rsync.net's scheme.

Re: Rsync.net Warrant Canary

#33

Post by tc »

dkarl wrote: post #27
tc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law takes the idea of forcing a person to speak much more seriously than the idea of forcing him to remain silent, particularly if you would be forcing him to make a knowingly false declaration. I can't think of an instance off-hand where a US judge has forced a civilian by injunction to make a known-false public statement.

Transparently contriving to escalate keeping a secret to making a positive declaration would, I think, not impress a judge very much. After all, it is rsync.net who is intentionally placing themselves in a position where making a false declaration is the only way to comply with the law. The judge does not need to force them to make a statement; he only needs to observe afterwards that they have communicated the fact…

Consider though that this is still a (nominally) free country, and they created this novel scenario 1) long before they were subject to any speech restrictions and 2) by making only true and public statements.

Then consider that they would come under speech restrictions through no fault of their own. It may be contrived, but they would be standing in a courtroom having committed no bad acts.

Would a judge order them to construct and publish a false statement? That's the question, but can you find case law that shows this ever having happened?

If not, then regardless of how contrived it is, it's still legally novel.

Re: Rsync.net Warrant Canary

#34

Post by etal »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #31
bluefish wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be an interesting legal case to say the least, especially because they do not indicate that they will provide further information about the warrant, or how to act other than individuals should "take special notice". Still I believe you are correct, by having a publicly stated policy about their planned inaction when served a secret warranty is effectively the same as making a public announcement. Ballsy, but…

It does seem like something that only works once. As soon as a warrant is served and they stop updating the file, when can they start updating it again? When the warrant is made public?

Does it matter? Either rsync.net is clean, or it's not. Once surveillance begins it could continue indefinitely, and once law enforcement decides rsync.net is a threat it's likely that they'll become a regular target. After that point, if you're not OK with having your data searched by government agencies, you're not going to be entirely comfortable with rsync.net. But until that point, rsync.net can stake a big claim on keeping your data safe.

Re: Rsync.net Warrant Canary

#35

Post by lsc »

boundlessdreamz wrote: post #7
callahad wrote: post #5

Rsync.net is a fantastically awesome service. Check out their FAQ: Will you support my use of X ? Yes. If you are using X with an rsync.net filesystem, we will support and troubleshoot your use of it, regardless of how complex or esoteric that usage or application is. All such support will be handled by a real live Unix engineer, and will never be dealt with by a ticket system, autoresponder, or first level / junior…

How well will this scale? Isn't this setting the expectations too high and if the company grows well this promise might be difficult to adhere to.

they've been around for a while. I had an account with johncompanies before I started prgmr.com. My experience was quite positive.

I've heard this 'it doesn't scale' argument many times, and I think the source is that the sort of skills it takes to maintain support infrastructure of that quality are quite different from and rarely present in the same individual (or management of a company) as the skills required to scale out a product to the mass market.

Also, I don't believe the mass market doesn't really want a unix nerd on the level 1 support line. they want someone who speaks 'normal person.'

Re: Rsync.net Warrant Canary

#36

Post by lsc »

iigs wrote: post #25

While I admire the spirit of this, unfortunately I believe it's of limited use: Once word gets out that these guys are LEA "unfriendly", it will start to attract the kinds of people that get LEA attention, and then they'll have to respond to a court order / subpoena / warrant / lawful intercept, and it's all over. Large ISPs routinely get subpoena requests all the time (i.e. they have teams that do only that). I thin…

/Large ISPs routinely get subpoena requests all the time/

sure, but I don't think they are secret very often.

Re: Rsync.net Warrant Canary

#38

Post by oomkiller »

callahad wrote: post #5

Rsync.net is a fantastically awesome service. Check out their FAQ: Will you support my use of X ? Yes. If you are using X with an rsync.net filesystem, we will support and troubleshoot your use of it, regardless of how complex or esoteric that usage or application is. All such support will be handled by a real live Unix engineer, and will never be dealt with by a ticket system, autoresponder, or first level / junior…

I use Rsync.net and have been very happy with them. They even give you the option now to do pull backups via cron to prevent hackers deleting your backups a la the avsim.com hack.

Re: Rsync.net Warrant Canary

#39

Post by forsaken »

Nobody has pointed out how easily the "news story" of today could be faked and updated. It's a simple script that would be able to read google news, pick out a random story, and throw it in the PGP signed message. How can that not be automated?
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