warrant canary

English

Etymology

Allusion to a miner's canary.

Noun

warrant canary (plural warrant canaries)

1. (US) A public notice that a service provider has not received a secret government subpoena for their customers' data that they would be prohibited from saying they had received.
   • 2012 July 9, Markus Jakobsson, editors, The Death of the Internet, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 159:

     However, it may be possible, via a warrant canary or a similar technique, for a CA to communicate the existence of a secret court order to the Internet community.

   • 2014 May 30, Alex Hern, “Encryption software TrueCrypt closes doors in odd circumstances”, in The Guardian‎^[1], →ISSN:

     Warrant canaries are legal tricks employed by conscientious organisations to get around the fact that certain demands from the US government cannot be disclosed publicly.

   • 2014 July 25, Jacob Long, “Exclusive: Private Internet Access talks warrants, canaries, transparency”, in Geeksided‎^[2], archived from the original on 3 August 2014:

     A warrant canary is a defense against the gag orders that come with National Security Letters and other secret subpoenas. With a warrant canary, the site would some sort of message posted saying, for example, “we have not received a secret subpoena as of July 24, 2014.”

References

• https://web.archive.org/web/20140707201759/https://www.linx.net/service/publicpeering/nova