Coal miners once carried canaries underground. If dangerous gas built up, the bird showed it first, and its silence was the warning. A warrant canary works on the same principle: a statement that is only meaningful while it keeps being renewed.
The problem it solves
In some countries, authorities can demand user data and, at the same time, forbid the company from telling anyone. These are gag orders, and they often come attached to secret legal demands.
A company under a gag order may be barred from saying "we received a demand". The idea is that it is much harder to compel a company to keep publishing a statement it knows is false. So instead of announcing a demand, a company publishes a regular statement that it has not received one. If that statement disappears or stops being renewed, readers can draw their own conclusions.
What a canary can and cannot tell you
A canary is a signal, not a guarantee.
- It can tell you that, as of a stated date, the operator says no secret demands or forced backdoors have occurred.
- It cannot tell you about ordinary legal requests that the operator is free to disclose, so look for a separate count of those.
- It cannot prove anything on its own. It depends on the honesty of the operator and on the legal situation in its country.
- A lapse is not proof of compromise. Outages and publishing mistakes happen too.
How to read Neir's canary
Neir's canary is at neir.io/canary.
It currently states that:
- No National Security Letters, FISA orders or classified demands have been received.
- Neir is not under a gag order preventing disclosure of a government request.
- No backdoor or interception capability has been installed under compulsion.
- Neir's infrastructure has not been seized or placed under government control.
The page shows when it was last updated and the date by which it must be renewed. It also shows a running count of disclosed legal requests. A request does not necessarily mean any data was handed over.
If the page disappears, returns an error, or passes its renewal date, treat the canary as expired.
Verifying messages from Neir
The canary page also publishes the OpenPGP key that official messages from Neir support may be signed with. Before you trust a message that claims to come from us, verify its signature and check that the key fingerprint matches the one on the canary page exactly:
A1E7 25BF 6F4A 6DD6 0736 E585 47EA 0FE0 8CEA DFAC
Why it sits next to minimal data
A canary matters most alongside a design that has little to hand over. Neir does not collect phone numbers, recovery emails or identity documents. Web and mail-login logs never record IP addresses, and the webmail copy of your mail is encrypted to your own key. What we do keep is listed in the Privacy Policy.
Photo: Alice Chodura (Oceancetaceen), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.