Slashdot Mirror
Site Launches To Track Warrant Canaries
Trailrunner7 writes: In the years since Edward Snowden began putting much of the NSA's business in the street, including its reliance on the secret FISA court and National security Letters, warrant canaries have emerged as a key method for ISPs, telecoms, and other technology providers to let the public know whether they have received any secret orders. But keeping track of the various canaries scattered around the Web is difficult, so a group of legal and civil liberties organizations have come together to launch a new site to monitor the known warrant canaries.
The Canary Watch site is the work of the EFF, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and NYU's Technology Law and Policy Center and it works on a simple concept. The site maintains a list of all of the known warrant canaries and periodically checks each organization's site to see whether the canary is still there and then lists any changes to the status. Right now, Canary Watch lists 11 organizations, including Lookout, Pinterest, Reddit, and Tumblr.
"Canarywatch lists the warrant canaries we know about, tracks changes or disappearances of those canaries, and allows users to submit canaries not listed on the site. For people with interest in a particular canary, the site will show any changes we know about," Nadia Kayyali of the EFF said in a blog post.
The Canary Watch site is the work of the EFF, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and NYU's Technology Law and Policy Center and it works on a simple concept. The site maintains a list of all of the known warrant canaries and periodically checks each organization's site to see whether the canary is still there and then lists any changes to the status. Right now, Canary Watch lists 11 organizations, including Lookout, Pinterest, Reddit, and Tumblr.
"Canarywatch lists the warrant canaries we know about, tracks changes or disappearances of those canaries, and allows users to submit canaries not listed on the site. For people with interest in a particular canary, the site will show any changes we know about," Nadia Kayyali of the EFF said in a blog post.
What is the goal here?
I think it's simply to bring some transparency and visibiity to the number and scope of secret warrants.
Re "I really wish someone would have the balls to stand up to the blatantly unconstitutional bullshit prevalent in the system."
A few groups in the USA have:
"In 2005, Library Connection, received a National Security Letter (NSL) from the FBI, along with its accompanying perpetual gag order, demanding library patrons’ records." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You seem to be unaware that Federal agency regulations are enforceable long before a situation can be brought before any court. The agencies have their own "courts" as defined by agency law, with their own means of encouraging cooperation. Such as confiscation of property, like all your computers and hard drives. And your cars. And your house. And your passport. Oh, and freezing your bank accounts.
It is all done according to their regulations, generally. The agencies are the ones who take the general guidelines given to them by directives of the Executive branch and/or laws of the Legislative branch and work them up into whatever regulations the agencies think would be most effective. That always means self-serving, to some extent. If you will notice, there is no mention in any of this about being innocent until proven guilty-- this is not court law, this is agency regulation.
It is a crappy system. It can be badly abused: J. Edgar Hoover. There needs to be reform. But this is so integral to the standing government-- all those agencies and bureaucrats who are unaffected by elections-- that reform is not going to happen anytime soon, and possibly not without bloodshed. And by the way, I'm a hippy leftest libtard, not a gun rights freak or anything like that.
Will
Posting it just confirms that you received it.
Tear it up and shred it, it is just a letter that has no power.
I consider NSLs to be unconstitutional
There is a quote from H.P. Lovecraft that is relevant here: "Do not call up what you can't put down."
Do nothing until you talk to a lawyer.
Talk to a lawyer whose only loyalty is to his client --- you --- and not the advocate for the EFF.
What is to say that court orders won't require making false statements to general public (ie. false canary)?
Footnote on rsync's canary says this:
"This scheme is not infallible. Although signing the declaration makes it impossible for a third party to produce arbitrary declarations, it does not prevent them from using force to coerce rsync.net to produce false declarations. "
http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt