Silent Circle removes warrant canary

https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/05/silent-circle-silently-snuffs-out-its-warrant-canary-but-claims-its-a-business-decision/

by n1000 • 10 years ago

226 173 10 years ago

techcrunch.com

2close4comfort• 10 years ago

After the departure of Mr Callas this probably further proof of the decline in Silent Circle more than anything. Too bad...it showed promise. Probably too close DC to really affect change.

nickpsecurity7• 10 years ago

It had friggin Navy SEALs in it's advertisements. They know what we need because they were in the field and needed secure comms. Help run the business, too. All that told me is anyone concerned about Five Eyes surveillance better run.

dexterdog2• 10 years ago

The founder and original CEO was a SEAL.

bitxbitxbitcoin• 10 years ago

After the last missed warrant canary update, some internal decision was probably made to scrap the warrant canary altogether. Big mistake.

jakobdabo2• 10 years ago

Current warrant canaries are useless, it's a one time fuse. We need new, better, recurring (i.e. monthly) warrant canaries of different types (common canaries, individual canaries for each user). I want something like this everywhere:

    Jan 2016 - we haven't received any NSL

    Feb 2016 - we haven't received any NSL concerning your account

    Mar 2016 - we haven't received any NSL

    Apr 2016 - 

    Jun 2016 - we haven't received any NSL

CiPHPerCoder• 10 years ago

Why monthly and not daily? Or hourly?

jakobdabo2• 10 years ago

I haven't put much thought into it, I guess it could be daily but hourly is overkill I think.

Actually, this is an interesting startup idea - warrant canary as a service, with an API.

greenokapi• 10 years ago

I wonder what the legal limits on the granularity are, probably up for a lot of interpretation in a court.

anonbanker4• 10 years ago

it is a disturbing commentary on our rights in society that we have to actually think about these things as a normal part of life. it is remarkable our ability and resolve to continue enforcing our rights in new and creative ways, but we should actually all recognize the fact that our right to privacy has been completely violated, as well as our right to self-incrimination.

bostonpete• 10 years ago

I believe the receipt of an NSL prohibits future announcements like that.

Retric• 10 years ago

That's a great way to end up in prison. That said, civil disobedience has been used in the past to great effect.

spiderfarmer• 10 years ago

  That's a great way to end up in prison.

It's like you're talking about an oppressive regime, but no, it's the USA. The land of opportunity, independence and above all, freedom. /s

logicallee5• 10 years ago

That's a great way to end up in prison

easy there, cowboy, this isn't East Germany just yet. I think American authorities can tell the difference between what they do and the Stasi.

As in, I actually, literally think they can tell the difference. Nobody will be ending up in prison for posting the above. Seriously. Show me a judge who'll do that.

You don't get a 4-year philosophy degree before getting a JD in American law, and structurally answer to a constitution literally containing the words "Congress shall make no law ...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" which is the first amendment, and which has been judged and interpreted very carefully by 9 independent justices upholding Freedom for 220 years, while sending people to prison for publishing

" Apr 2016 - "

Not happening. Not in 2016, and not in 2020. People need some perspective here.

EDIT: getting a lot of downvotes. Show me anyone who is in prison for publishing " Apr 2016 - " or any other similar warrant canary. You people need to stop throwing around "a great way to end up in prison" like that.

I'm not defending the status quo, but the suggestion that anybody is going to prison for posting a warrant canary is too much, sorry.

It diminishes the conversation and criticism around the actual status quo.

matthewmarkus10• 10 years ago

I've always wondered if there is a side-channel that could be used instead of a warrant canary. More specifically, my understanding is that witnesses have Miranda Rights. Therefore, couldn't a company promulgate a process whereby they'll publicly solicit bids for legal counsel should they receive a NSL? If they start asking for bids, you can assume they've received a NSL. If not, then no NSL has been received.

Any lawyers in the house?

* Edited slightly for clarity.

burkaman6• 10 years ago

I'm not a lawyer, but I think you almost definitely can't do that. The law is not an algorithm, at some point a human judge is going to decide if you've broken it. If the law says "you can't tell anyone" and you tell someone, you've broken the law. It doesn't matter if you told someone through the medium of a press release, or a predefined "unrelated (wink)" process.

anonbanker4• 10 years ago

burning karma as breadcrumbs to a fantastic idea.

waterphone• 10 years ago

Not a lawyer, but according to Wikipedia, Ladar Levison ran into issues surrounding lawyer acquisition during the Lavabit case:

Afterwards, Levison wrote that after being contacted by the FBI, he was subpoenaed to appear in federal court, and was forced to appear without legal representation because it was served on such short notice; in addition, as a third party, he had no right to representation, and was not allowed to ask anyone who was not an attorney to help find him one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit

solotronics• 10 years ago

What if you told everyone that you would probably retain a specific lawyer if you were served a warrant such as this. If your company retains that specific council and makes a post on your website I don't see how that can be misconstrued as a warrant canary.

alphapapa2• 10 years ago

What about something simple, like saying, "If we ever receive an NSL, we will change the background color of our web site."

rsync2• 10 years ago

The rsync.net warrant canary has been issued monthly, with news headlines, for over ten years now.[1][2]

We split it for each location - SanDiego/Denver/Zurich/HongKong. Further, the individual location canaries can be retrieved from the actual storage array itself - that is, you can just fetch it via sftp/scp/rsync/whatever from (whatever system your account is on).

Finally, our canary is machine readable/parseable and nicely formatted. So much so that the maintainer of "Canary Watch" has told me that he wishes all warrant canaries followed our original format.

Oh By[3] will have a similar canary soon, modeled exactly after the rsync.net warrant canary.

[1] https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

[2] http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2010/08/the-warrant-can...

[3] https://0x.co

res0nat0r• 10 years ago

Can you comment on if you believe these to be actually effective? I don't see how when the USG says that you cannot divulge that you've received any type of NSL, they can easily say you must continue to act like you have in the past.

I just don't see a court or a judge upholding a "cute" or "technical" workaround for something like this. Haven't there been rulings in the past where these aren't valid, ie just like the article above once you do get NSL's etc you must take them down or be at risk of non compilance?

tedunangst• 10 years ago

"We did not, at 2:43pm on the 17th of July, receive a request for any information related to the account identified as jakobdabo." (Request actually received at 2:44pm.) That'll trick 'em for sure!

zardeh• 10 years ago

That's illegal

cbsmith4• 10 years ago

I imagine there are legal difficulties with being more transparent, but I will say Silent Circle's occasional failures to manage their canary well have made it an unreliable signal.

rdl2• 10 years ago

The original proposal for how to do warrant canaries is pretty valid (Steve Schear) -- basically they'd be a paid service, sort of like a bug bounty, and multiple canaries, very specific. They would be a revenue center, too.

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/cypherpunks-lne-archive/...

hendersoon8• 10 years ago

Traditional warrant canaries are issued regularly, just as you described it.

It would be fantastic to get more granular, at the account-level. That would be a cool differentiator for these hardcore privacy/security-oriented companies.

rtkwe6• 10 years ago

No company is going to do that. Doing that would get them in trouble with normal warrants much less NSLs.

rtkwe6• 10 years ago

The more information your canary provides the more likely it is you'll get charged with breaching the NSL gag order. Current canaries don't bring down the ire of the various 3 letter agencies partially because they provide such tiny amount of information. Canaries down to the individual user would definitely be in violation of the gag order on an NSL and ever bring a lot of trouble if you did it for normal warrants!

zekevermillion3• 10 years ago

I'm not sure warrant canaries are particularly useful anymore. Yes, it's nice to know when a company has received a secret order or request for cooperation. However, any company that stores user information is going to receive such an order or request at some point, it's practically inevitable. Furthermore, one can never be assured that a canary is entirely reliable as a signal -- just look at the other comments with conjecture as to why a canary might be removed. Thus I would conclude that the use of a warrant canary should not be taken as conveying any useful information about a company, or not any more useful information that a mere marketing statement that they are sympathetic with user privacy concerns.

pavel_lishin2• 10 years ago

Furthermore, one can never be assured that a canary is entirely reliable as a signal -- just look at the other comments with conjecture as to why a canary might be removed.

I would treat the removal of a canary as I would a fire alarm. Sure, it's possible that it's a business decision, just like it's possible that the fire alarm is a false alarm. But I'd rather make the assumption that is most likely to protect me.

zekevermillion3• 10 years ago

Fair point. I would make that assumption from the beginning though, regardless of whatever the service provider tells me. It's a shame though, as the warrant canary is such an ingenious legal device that I have to admire it even as I doubt its usefulness.

corobo• 10 years ago

"Warning. Warning. Your user information may have been passed on to <whoever>"

Ok now what?

DavideNL2• 10 years ago

I'm not sure warrant canaries are particularly useful anymore However, any company that stores user information is going to receive such an order or request at some point, it's practically inevitable.

I assume you are talking about the U.S. only ?

There are many other countries in the world, where gag-orders are not legally possible, or not as common as in the U.S. I would say warrant canaries are still useful there.

linkregister• 10 years ago

Which countries in the world don't have legally possible gag orders?

794CD016• 10 years ago

The wording of your statement incorrectly implies that warrant canaries were ever useful.

swordswinger12• 10 years ago

I have an honest, and probably dumb, question: how do warrant canaries actually avoid the prohibition against disclosing the receipt of a national security letter? Like, how is taking down a warrant canary legally dissimilar from just tweeting "we got an NSL"? If it semantically "means" the same thing, then why is one illegal and one legal?

joekrill• 10 years ago

I think the idea is that a warrant canary is regularly updated. And the fact that it is NOT updated would be an indicator that a warrant (or whatever) has been served. So it's the INACTION that triggers it, not an actual action (like tweeting).

ocdtrekkie• 10 years ago

I suppose for that you would need to say "We have not received a letter as of $date" and then stop updating that date. The current notion, adding a line you'd remove if you did receive one, may be still an action, if it's part of your default reporting.

But I don't believe warrant canaries "actually work" in practice.

freshhawk• 10 years ago

It's certainly a gray area, and a potentially dangerous one, so for legal protection if you take that warrant canary down then you would normally publicly state that it is absolutely not because you got an NSL, but for other reasons.

Like say, "business reasons".

fucking_tragedy• 10 years ago

I'd like to see it tried in court, anyone with two braincells can see that it signals that a NSL was received, something that's prohibited by an NSL. The intent and signaling are there.

abhorrence• 10 years ago

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that warrant canaries work through inaction. If a court were to require the continued publishing of the canary, they'd be crossing the line from something approximating a "temporary restriction", to compelled speech. And though I think neither are particularly defensible, the latter is much less so.

The key with warrant canaries is that they aren't removing a line from something previously published, but failing to publish an update to to it.

sigmar• 10 years ago

I was looking into the limits of compelled speech during the Apple v FBI situation earlier this year. IANAL. The courts have said that there are some definite limits on when the government can force speech. I'm not sure where a warrant canary falls, but you should look at Wooley v. Maynard if you want to learn more[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooley_v._Maynard

rtkwe6• 10 years ago

They're vague enough that it really doesn't reveal any useful and live in a weird area where preventing them from working would be compelling speech which courts have been iffy about. So while they're not providing any real information about the NSL other than 'at some point in the last $TIME_PERIOD we received a NSL (or Bob who pushed for the canary forgot to put the new canary up)' they're not enough of a break for the FBI et al to bother.

AdmiralAsshat• 10 years ago

Warrant canaries have outlived their usefulness. Did anyone stop using Reddit when they removed theirs? Or Apple products, when they removed theirs?

anonbanker4• 10 years ago

Sadly, you're correct, but not for the reason you mean. People don't care about their rights anymore, having traded them in for convenience. Because "war".

EDIT: maybe the downvoters could respond with how I'm wrong?

cbsmith4• 10 years ago

I'm sure some people did. Probably the same number of people who started using them because the canaries were there.

However, that doesn't mean users haven't changed their behaviour in response to warrant canaries.

It's just not a lot of people, and it isn't clear we want it to be that way either. We don't want there to be a disincentive for companies creating them.

knowaveragejoe• 10 years ago

To continue this line of thinking, the case can be made that warrant canaries could be used to flush out a subset of users from a service, among whom are those that would be considered "interesting" by intelligence agencies.

n1000• 10 years ago

People keep saying that. But I don't quite see why? Can anyone enlighten me?

Sir_Substance• 10 years ago

I think American authorities can tell the difference between what they do and the Stasi.

Of course they can, they're protecting their nations chosen way of life, while the Stasi were oppressing citizens who dared resist the status quo. The difference is clear.

ghurtado• 10 years ago

The difference is clear.

That's either some fine quality sarcasm, or I'm going to need some help understanding the difference between the two.

Didn't you just describe the same job from two different points of view (opressor vs opressed)?

dang3• 10 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12038870 and marked it off-topic.

anonbanker4• 10 years ago

Bail.

We need to crash the company in order to give these guys plausible deniability when they do not cooperate. The company will die, but another will be created. Their freedom is on the line.

Abandon ship, citizens. Your Bill of Rights commands you.

cordite3• 10 years ago

I've been using Silent Circle's black phone 2 for almost a year now, and it is a rather terrible experience.

They are ahead on app-specific permission denials, but they have hardly any sense of decent QA for their SilentOS.

Previous updates had power regressions where the phone would be dead from a full charge within 8 hours. Took 3 months for them to fix that. Most recent update no longer has a functioning headphone jack, and will forget all bluetooth paired devices on reboot. It also is crashing after 15 minutes of map usage as it seems to overheat.

Perhaps they may do better in the future, but I won't be staying with their product and services for much longer.

That said, it seems like the explicit update-system they run for their own software and the operating system would lessen the likelihood of an on-demand compromise from a state agent to an individual's device. Though it's not like the individual can do anything besides trust that the signed packages are authentic.

btreecat2• 10 years ago

It also is crashing after 15 minutes of map usage as it seems to overheat.

So it might be worth checking in "Developer options" if "Force GPU Rendering" is checked. If it is, try un-checking it and seeing if it keeps your phone a little cooler.

cordite3• 10 years ago

It appears to be off by default.

fredgrott• 10 years ago

its tricky to do what they do with the limits they have on resources..they had tried to get me on board in 2010 as android dev..but I bailed after determining that they would just not come close to the resources to actually pull it off with a level high quality needed....mobile OSes are harder to fork than desktop OSes

StavrosK5• 10 years ago

That's weird, the company was founded in late 2011 and the Blackphone only started being developed in 2013 or so.

secfirstmd• 10 years ago

I'm excited by prospect of The Guardian Project and Copperhead collaboration. https://copperhead.co/android/

chrsstrm• 10 years ago

will forget all bluetooth paired devices on reboot

OT but asking because I'm genuinely curious, if your goal is to have a "secure phone," why would you be pairing it to peripherals via Bluetooth? Or maybe am I misunderstanding "secure" in this case? The marketing speak on the the Blackphone 2 site seems more about "privacy" than security.

cordite3• 10 years ago

A smart watch for notifications. Having voice reply is useful.

bogomipz2• 10 years ago

Can someone explain how a canary is implemented in software exactly?

medecau• 10 years ago

Did you receive a National Security Letter?

No? Okay, I'll update the date. Canary date is updated.

Yes? Okay, see you in the after-life I guess. Canary update process dies.

bogomipz2• 10 years ago

Thanks

rdl2• 10 years ago

Generally you DON'T want to implement it in software; you want to make it a manual/human-in-the-loop process, ideally involving an offline signature key.

794CD016• 10 years ago

Members of the US military swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, including domestic ones. Just because your family members might be oathbreakers doesn't mean everyone in the military is.

nickpsecurity7• 10 years ago

Whoa, that's harsh. Actually, military abandoned one of ours leaving them to die despite excellent, decorated performance. Had to get home on his own who knows how through the Middle East. Others came and went the ordinary ways. Different soldiers in the family have different perspectives on the military. None are affecting what I'm saying except as anecdotal support about how loyal soldiers are to military during their terms & maintaining close relationships afterward in many cases.

Far as Constitution, soldiers all do swear it as they're told to. Some mean it, some don't. Yet, the liars that got more soldiers killed in Iraq than 9/11 are still alive and free despite all those soldiers' oaths about domestic enemies. Many soldiers continue to serve under these corrupt politicians and even hit new targets on basis of their word. More importantly here, the military and civilians working in the mass collection programs are all working hard at eliminating Constitutional freedoms in terms of 4th and 5th Amendment while watching their leaders lie under oath about it. Can count who came forward on one hand out of thousands to who knows how many. That's saying something.

The disconnect between that and you're statement is that you're ignoring that each member of the military has their own view of what doing their duty is which is usually highly biased. Most of them at least start with the one instilled in them by American culture (pro-military mostly) and military indoctrination. Guess what the military indoctrination didn't teach them? That secretive organizations in the military and intelligence sector are spying on all Americans' data feeding stuff to law enforcement and other groups that has nothing to do with terrorism despite what the law said about that. That they need to oppose or take out those organizations. Instead, they're told to believe and do what they're told by such groups even if it supports illegal SIGINT efforts. Most do at least for the duration of their service. Many will think of fellow soldiers as an extended family of sorts afterward.

So, believing the loyalty of military personnel is to the military is a suitable default. Unless we get hundreds of new leakers soon and all kinds of soldiers storming Washington for sole purpose of getting rid of corrupt politicians that have them killed for selfish gain. I don't see either. Most of them must be on military and politicians' sides in practice. Or just apathetic, which is its own danger.

dang3• 10 years ago

Just because your family members might be oathbreakers

Personal attacks (which attacking someone's family is) are not allowed on Hacker News. Please don't do this again.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12038978 and marked it off-topic.

794CD016• 10 years ago

Are personal defenses, like mentioning your own family similarly not allowed? Or do the rules just make that an irrefutable argument?

codezero• 10 years ago

This is kind of off topic, but afaik, warrant canaries have never been tested in court.

It seems very unlikely, given the pervasiveness of NSLs that all orgs still using canaries have never received an NSL. Has anyone collected a list of all the companies with canaries?

StavrosK5• 10 years ago

I work for silent circle, as a backend developer. I speak for myself, and not the company.

As far as I know (and, sure, I may not know, although if someone wanted something from the server I'm one of a few guys that could get it), we haven't received any letters. What makes me even more confident, though, is the fact that there really isn't much data to give. All we have is some ciphertexts for attachments, and messages aren't retained, even encrypted (why would they)?

We don't even log IPs or other personal information, so I'm not sure what usefulness an NSL would serve.

Anyway, this is not an official company stance, I just wanted to comment about my personal experience because I see some speculation here.

llamataboot• 10 years ago

hmmm, but surely if you are going to go to the trouble of keeping up a warrant canary, you're not going to accidentally take it down?

StavrosK5• 10 years ago

Are you talking about this instance, or the previous one where it failed to be updated?

hippich• 10 years ago

canary could also mean that starting now company begun gathering information for giving it away to NSA :)

Osiris• 10 years ago

Couldn't an NSL force the company to start retaining that information though? You may not have past data but you can certainly collect future information.

hendersoon8• 10 years ago

Yes, they can try to compel you to do literally anything. Remember they tried to get Lavabit's SSL certs. Either you comply or fight it in secret court.

StavrosK5• 10 years ago

I honestly don't know, I'm not a lawyer and I'm not familiar with what the secret courts (the concept of which I openly have much disdain for) can make you do. Keep in mind that SC is a Swiss company, so I don't know how much the US can compel.

mikestew2• 10 years ago

I speak for myself, and not the company.

As soon as you said "I work for that company", you speak for them, whether you like it or not and no amount of disclaiming changes that in the mind of the reader. Additionally, you went on to explain things that only someone that works there would know, so you are explicitly speaking for the company. I'd normally recommend that an employee delete such a post, perhaps explaining the error. Given that it involves an NSL, I recommend this action more strongly than I might normally. Ask yourself, "what do I and the company have to gain from such a post, other than getting to sound like an 'insider' on HN?", and then ask "what's my worst possible outcome of posting such a thing?" Weigh the two, choose a winner.

As a warning to others, one should always ask themselves if they are posting outside their wheelhouse for an ego boost, or if it truly helpful information to others and to the company. Useful advice in the general case, IMO, but especially if you're posting in reply to "my company's in the news". I generally just shut the hell up and let the PR people handle it. Especially when you're an IC or middle-manager, 'cuz odds are that you don't have the full story.

3pt14159• 10 years ago

Eh, I'm not so sure he's endangering anything. He's only staking his personal reputation, that's what "I only speak for myself" means. If it comes out that the company does what he says he doesn't see them do, then hes only burning himself; not the company. Worst case scenario he gets fired and someone else will hire him. It isn't like he works for the NSA. Good software developers are hard to find and bleeding information serves a purpose.

tptacek2• 10 years ago

I'm not sure what the point of this comment is, but want to chime in to say I'm always happy when people directly connected to stories on HN take the time to shed what light they can on them. I'm kind of repelled by the instinct we have to tear those people down.

eldondev• 10 years ago

Actually, a lot of times I think IC's have the fullest story. If you are a backend dev at a smallish company, you probably know how the stuff works. Also, warning people against "waking up to a bad day" is spoken as someone who really values their place as a cog in a machine. If your co-workers are not being frank with you, in my opinion that company is probably not a really healthy environment, and best to move to greener pastures. I think HN is about frank talk, and let the PR people send canned releases to ars.

jjcm• 10 years ago

I've been bit for talking about a company I've worked for in the past, simply because someone took my personal opinions as company dogma. That said, I still continue to do it. I feel it really adds value and a human element to a conversation. People all to often forget that a company is a collection of individuals. Getting insight from one of those individuals, especially one who isn't PR or management is really refreshing.

Yea, there's a chance it will backfire. But I think that if everyone speaks openly it's much better for the community. I think one of the things you're also overlooking is the teacher effect - talking about something and teaching it provides a better insight and understanding of it to yourself. I've had great insights into things I've been working on because I discussed things surrounding them on reddit or HN. Community feedback is always valuable.

noonespecial• 10 years ago

We don't even log IPs or other personal information, so I'm not sure what usefulness an NSL would serve.

Perhaps you were just ordered to start... and plugging in that little black box from the G-Men somehow, umm, killed the canary process. Somehow.

StavrosK5• 10 years ago

Perhaps, but, if that were the case, I think our security officer (who is a great guy and great at his work) would have quit immediately on moral grounds.

It's more likely (and I'm just grossly speculating now) that the business weighed the relatively small chance of us being ordered to give the virtually zero amount of data we have on everyone with the chance that something will go wrong updating the canary and there will be a bunch of bad publicity again.

Keep in mind that, while one may think "you're just uploading a text file, how hard can it be", it's much more resource-intensive than that. You need multiple redundant people to make sure the world doesn't freak out because your CSO was on vacation, you need them to coordinate about updating, you need them to (crucially) know how to store the PGP keys securely, you need to keep that number low to make sure the key isn't stolen from one of them, you need good tooling to minimize the chance that there's a mistake while uploading, you need to keep the machines that host it running even after a move, the DNS entries up, monitoring to tell you if the canary is stale, etc.

It's a lot of things to get right and a lot of things that can go wrong, and the failure case for that is "your stock goes down", which is a heavy price. I think the mistake here was that there wasn't a bigger, more explicit and pre-emptive announcement (something like "we'll take the canary down in X weeks because Y"), which I think would have more successfully assuaged fears.

ams6110• 10 years ago

not related to any warrant for user data which we have not received.

Interesting choice of words.

hendersoon8• 10 years ago

National security letters can't compel Silent Circle to actually lie. That's key. So we are faced with two possible scenarios.

1) They're telling the truth, didn't get any warrants, and (nearly beyond belief!) decided to retire their warrant canary with a completely silly and unfounded justification, leading clueful observers to believe they're incompetent fools.

2) They're lying on their own recognizance and are deliberately collaborating with some three-letter agency to compromise their users' privacy, contrary to the very justification for their company's existence and betraying their customers' trust.

So. Fools or traitors. Shall we flip a coin?

Either way, if you care enough about your privacy to buy a Blackphone in the first place, time to remove the battery and toss it in the bin.

fatdog• 10 years ago

The naivety of warrant canaries shows a kind of desperate denial, especially in the wake of Snowden. Warrant canaries are more about preserving the myth of a principled legal system than a real rebellion against deep state surveillance.

I think people cling to the fiction because the alternative is too awful for them to bear. We've gone from denial to a bargaining phase, where we come up with little technicalities that might preserve our beliefs. Next will be anger, and then a polarization of how people act on their eventual acceptance.

As someone who has seriously evaluated buying a blackphone and support SC in principle, I couldn't bring myself to do it. It's not just them, they're just the most viable and so they catch all the criticism from nerds like me. I wanted a physical lens cap, hardware switches for all microphones and all radios, a removable microSD key module, an option to use the 2nd sim slot as a custom javacard crypto module, a hypervisor for android versions (which I think they have something like) a key management spec published in BAN logic, and the moon. The moon would do.

Basically, I wanted the AR-15 platform of smart phones, where the baseband processor is just the lower receiver. Said nobody who wanted to make money ever.

i am not against them, but I do think SC, wickr, whatsapp, firechat, and privacy companies like them need a narrative pivot. The tech will be valuable, but real market fit depends on popular acceptance of a state level threat model - or at least a desire to be seen as against it.

Today, it's the electronic equivalent to wearing a motorcycle club patch. Yeah, lots of military and law enforcement and regular folks are in motorcycle clubs, but it's a statement. Privacy apps today are a shibboleth with negative skewed optionality.

One of these companies could become the harley davidson of privacy platforms, (whatsapp is close) but that's the upside. An aging rebel brand torn between loyalty and relevance.

The user base for these niche, qualitative difference apps is not unlike the story of indie record labels back in the 80s. Outsider identities, alternative social networks with their own shibboleths. If anyone can figure out who ever got rich off goth, the business model for privacy tech might be within reach. For now, privacy is just an effects pedal and some shitty makeup for bland suburban consumer apps.

The warrant canary issue is a romantic misunderstanding of law, markets, and politics, and the issue is the least important thing about a company like Silent Circle.

headShrinker• 10 years ago

The warrant canary issue is a romantic misunderstanding of law, markets, and politics, and the issue is the least important thing about a company like Silent Circle.

Misunderstanding of...? If it disappears it's either 'a business decision and/or NSL or just a NSL. What's the misunderstanding? There are some people who are more relaxed about Trump proclaiming that he "hates protestors'. I am not. When someone says they hate protestors, I set warrant canaries on all my websites. This is a scary time and warrant canaries are literally the least we can do. Furthermore when someone removes a warrant canary then explains it as "a business decision" whatever the actual reason, they have told you the type of company they are; a company that removes warrant canaries.

dlmetcalf2• 10 years ago

"not related to any warrant for user data which we have not received"

"not related to any warrant for user data, which we have not received"

dlmetcalf2• 10 years ago

Not calling it, just pointing that out.

mirimir• 10 years ago

I can't imagine that it costs very much to host a warrant canary. They had one, and took it down. So arguably they've either been pressured, or have decided that it was sending the wrong message about them. "Meh, who cares?" doesn't seem very likely to me, given their history and image.

curried_haskell• 10 years ago

I love how when a canary goes down, everyone's arguing about what it means. Of course if the company received an NSL they won't confirm it and will lie about the canary to protect their business. Why should we take their statements at face value?

The canary is gone. They have received an NSL. If we don't assume this, then what the fuck was the point of the canary in the first place?

Silent Circle removes warrant canary

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