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Rsync.net Warrant Canary

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Re: Rsync.net Warrant Canary

#41

Post by rpdillon »

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…

They're not actually saying a warrant was served - that is an important detail that no one seems to be mentioning. All they're doing is not saying that a warrant wasn't served, and the two aren't the same thing.

There are a variety of circumstances under which the warrant canary would not be published. A warrant being served might be one (it might not), but there are certainly others: policy change being the most obvious.

I don't think there is a good legal precedent in general for maintaining that someone's failure to speak (under whatever circumstances) violates a provision for secrecy. I think that would be a hard argument to make, given that, at most, the failure to publish would lead some people to suspect that some kind of warrant had been served for something, somewhere, sometime in the past week or so, that rsync might have. Vague, at best.

Re: Rsync.net Warrant Canary

#42

Post by dkarl »

tc wrote: post #33
dkarl wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Then consider that they would come under speech restrictions through no fault of their own.

Being served a warrant would not necessarily involve fault, either, yet it would put them under speech restrictions -- restrictions against making true and public statements. So current law already accepts that people can be punished for making true and public statements without committing any other bad acts.

I don't think the judge would order them to publish a false statement. I think the judge would simply punish them for revealing the warrant and respond to their pleas of speech coercion by saying, "Hey, your fault, not mine, and you did it on purpose." I mean, they're intentionally committing themselves to either publishing a false statement or breaking the law. They've showed their willingness, indeed their intention, to do one or the other if served with a warrant. If they intended to break the law, then they can hardly argue their innocence. If they intended to publish a false statement, then they can hardly argue that the court coerced them to do so. And the fact that they already explained their cunning plan means they can't argue lack of foresight, either.

As for novelty, I wouldn't even trust a lawyer to know whether this is novel. People have been splitting legal hairs since long before Solomon. Putting the letter of the law in contradiction to the spirit of the law is hardly a novel concept; this is just one possibly novel example. It's probably discussed in the Talmud somewhere. "Ah yes, the famous story of Francois the builder, who owed his brother Juan thirty-five rubles and agreed to repay him by shearing his sheep on the fifteenth day following the next new moon, knowing full well that the fifteenth day following the next new moon was a sabbath day, on which sheep-shearing was forbidden."

Re: Rsync.net Warrant Canary

#43

Post by ErrantX »

sachinag wrote: post #19
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…

This is no different than libraries having a sign up that says "The FBI has not been here" and taking it down after they have (second sign): http://www.librarian.net/technicality.html My understanding is that most observers believe that the sign is legal.

the analogy is not quite the same. Rsync are subtely different in that they are putting up a new dated sign each week and stop doing so if served a warrant.

(the point being they are not actively making a change [taking the sign down] to indicate a "visit". Could make a difference)

Re: Rsync.net Warrant Canary

#44

Post by enneff »

forsaken wrote: post #39

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?

If the signing can be done without a human providing the key/passphrase, then the whole thing is worth nothing anyway.

Re: Rsync.net Warrant Canary

#45

Post by lanaer »

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 are quite costly compared to other online backup services — and money tends to help with scalability.

Re: Rsync.net Warrant Canary

#47

Post by benatkin »

jsteele wrote: post #32
benatkin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Now that I've read your reply and took another look at the article, I wonder what I was thinking when I suggested it could be guessed!

Putting an actual quote in there makes it very secure.

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