SpiderOak's Warrant Canary Died
Full article186 words · extracted from schneier.com · click to collapse
BoingBoing has the story.
I have never quite trusted the idea of a warrant canary. But here it seems to have worked. (Presumably, if SpiderOak wanted to replace the warrant canary with a transparency report, they would have written something explaining their decision. To have it simply disappear is what we would expect if SpiderOak were being forced to comply with a US government request for personal data.)
EDITED TO ADD (8/9): SpiderOak has posted an explanation claiming that the warrant canary did not die—it just changed.
That’s obviously false, because it did die. And a change is the functional equivalent—that’s how they work. So either they have received a National Security Letter and now have to pretend they did not, or they completely misunderstood what a warrant canary is and how it works. No one knows.
I have never fully trusted warrant canaries—this EFF post explains why—and this is an illustration.
Tags: cloud computing, courts, national security policy, secrecy, transparency
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Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/08/spideroaks_warr.html