XmrBazaar (beta)

"A warrant canary is a colloquial term for a regularly published statement that a service provider has not received legal process that it would be prohibited from saying it had received. Once a service provider does receive legal process, the speech prohibition goes into place, and the canary statement is removed."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/warrant-canary-faq

example canary:
https://cock.li/canary.asc.txt

I think this should happen, however keep in mind that warrant canaries are useless against most federal investigations. Feds through the courts can order a company to continue the canary or even completely turn any entity into a honeypot, such as the Tor Project. Usually they don't do it because they don't need to do it (all our info is captured by our ISP and easily accessible with a warrant, and what isn't can be collected by government malware if it is important enough to them).

>Feds through the courts can order a company to continue the canary

i don't think so at least in the US which the admins are located in because that would be compelled speech. ofc they could do whatever to the site but with a canary you get a warning.

The legal basis is that 1A does not override a gag order which is in compliance with 4A. If you do a crime, certain rights are suspended because you "broke" the contract with the government, in the same way that contract law can force you to lose some 1A freedoms through a NDA because you voluntarily forfeited it. The Judge's ruling establishing the "reasonableness" of the order.

Of course, a prosecutor can choose not to make a big deal about it, and in most cases they probably won't care since most of the legally permissible evidence is obtained long before a warrant is issued to the defendant through warrants on ISPs, but they still have that card, and this is dangerous for a defendant because it opens the door for even if you are acquitted, they can declare a mistrial, basically giving them legal double jeopardy. Usually a mistrial happens before the verdict to avoid the optics of double jeopardy, but I have seen it happen after, so I know it is possible.

I'm pretty sure something like this happened to a hacking website where they were ordered to direct their members to a fed phishing page, but I heard this at DEF CON and I didn't hear the whole presentation, so maybe not. Sometimes they just talk about hypotheticals like "is this possible".

>If you do a crime, certain rights are suspended because you "broke" the contract with the government

while that might be true in this example i think its far more likely not the site owner themselves but one of there users are being investigated because of an alleged crime which should make a difference in leverage i would think (IANAL)

i think its still worth it since there have been real world examples

https://sij.law/warrant-canaries/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary#Usage

Oh yeah for sure, we definitely should have it, I'm not arguing against it. I just don't think people should put too much faith in it. If it disappears its a near sure sign glowies have struck, but just because it is present does not mean they aren't.