Ethereum Foundation removes their canary

https://github.com/ethereum/ethereum-foundation-website/commit/769b30603504b4b5e8f601f8014691a8d1821390

by diggan • 2 years ago

172 91 2 years ago

fish44• 2 years ago

Great - can we replace it with a crow if it was the USA, a budgie if it was EU. a magpie if it was Israel, a woodpecker if it was China (etc)

Green if it was tax organisation and yellow if is a criminal one

diggan3• 2 years ago

You kind of lose plausible deniability with that granularity, I'd guess.

superkuh3• 2 years ago

Technically even just removing a warrant canary immediately could put you at legal risk in the USA. The non-risky way is to update the canary $date every $timeperiod and then stop updating $date after an attack. That way nothing is changed to indicate but it still becomes obvious by lack of update after $timeperiod.

diggan3• 2 years ago

Yeah, that kind of irked me with the commit. Currently (769b306) it says:

this commit removes a section of the footer as we have received a voluntary enquiry from a state authority that included a requirement for confidentiality

Which... is just saying what happened? Point is to remove it without saying anything, as if you do, you'd break the "requirement for confidentiality" and put yourself at risk.

stusmall3• 2 years ago

The idea behind a canary is while they can tell you to keep it confidential, they can't compel your speech to lie and say you've never cooperated. Adding a wink wink nod nod code word defeats the idea.

IncreasePosts4• 2 years ago

Isn't saying "You can't talk about this" compelling speech? Why can the courts say "You can't talk about this" legally, but can't say "You can't update your warrant canary"?

fwip• 2 years ago

If you can just say in a commit message "we have received a voluntary enquiry from a state authority that included a requirement for confidentiality" surely the whole song and dance about canaries is pointless, right? Or did the committer fuck up and ruin their plausible deniability?

stusmall3• 2 years ago

I was really surprised to see that commit message. I wonder if they had that cleared? I'm guessing the committer didn't fully understand the concept.

dotnet002• 2 years ago

I guess they figure they can say they've received the inquiry, but can't say what the inquiry is about.

enlyth• 2 years ago

But then as the parent poster mentioned, what's the point of the whole canary concept

kylebenzle• 2 years ago

I think anyone can still say they they have NOT been contacted by a given agency?

That given, they are not going to "waste" their canary if it was a simple request for information. Best guess, this is the beginning of the end for Ethereum and they have been compromised just like Blockstream and BitcoinCore were previously.

It is best to assume that from now on Ethereum is no long a decentralized application but its development is being directed by a governmental agency, again, same as BitcoinCore.

Most important next step for Cryptocurrency is to make it development resistance. Every notable attack on crypo the last few years has not been hackers but developers like Greg Maxwell, Peter Todd and Adam Back who attack the code base out in the open, acting as useful idiots for three letter organizations. It seems ETH is next on the chopping block.

mattdesl• 2 years ago

Ethereum (the protocol) is not only developed by Ethereum Foundation; and further, the several client implementations are all open source and run by independent organizations.

Seems like wild speculation.

operator-name3• 2 years ago

Selectively choosing to not trigger a warrent canary defeats it's intended purpose - to communicate when you receive a gag order.

tromp• 2 years ago

This losing the whole point of a canary reminds me of Dr. Strangelove's quote

Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?

noqc• 2 years ago

This is an absolutely unbelievable Baader-Meinhoff coincidence. I was, less than 5 minutes ago, searching the script for this line so that I could send it to my father.

As proof, this is the only line returned when you search the text for the string "tell the". https://www3.nd.edu/~dlindley/handouts/DrS.htm

ajross• 2 years ago

Or they were just giving a finger to The Man. But yes, to the extent that a "we have never" canary would have protected them (which is a little questionable to be honest), this commit message taken alone absolutely opens them up to whatever penalties exist in whatever jurisdiction sent the demand.

byteknight• 2 years ago

How weird is it that the ethereum foundation repo (one of) has only 2 stars?

diggan3• 2 years ago

The "bigger"/more extensive website is ethereum.org (https://github.com/ethereum/ethereum-org-website), guess people aren't as interested in the foundation as they are in the project itself. I think that's pretty standard in the cryptocurrency scene.

chrisco255• 2 years ago

Even more relevant would be the Ethereum Improvement Proposal repo (where people submit proposals to change the spec):

https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs

Or the go-ethereum execution client (the most popular execution client):

https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum

operator-name3• 2 years ago

That partially explains why nobody noticed the change being made 2 weeks ago.

blt• 2 years ago

Probably a complete coincidence but it's interesting that the commit included lots of irrelevant formatting changes too.

neilv5• 2 years ago

Remember not to mix formatting changes into commits with semantic changes. :)

bmitc2• 2 years ago

It's a good rule of thumb, but it also feels like people use that as a tactic to continually change code to get away from having a formatting change come in. That's why on any new project, even personal ones, I enforce formatting from day one if the language has a formatter.

It's pretty annoying to work in a codebase that had no formmatter running so that I then have to make special adjustments to my editor to stop formatting on save for certain files.

saurik2• 2 years ago

I don't understand your point... how would continually changing code avoid formatting changes? If you want to change the formatting, just commit a change to the formatting.

barbazoo• 2 years ago

I like to bundle those in a separate commit at least.

mcfedr• 2 years ago

Right! What a mess of a commit

yard2010• 2 years ago

Look they used prettier on this css file how convenient

im3w1l• 2 years ago

I used to believe this but then I found myself spending way more time on clean single-purpose commits than I saved looking at a clean commit log.

Especially if the cleanup touches the same code you are semantically modifying you are basically forced into a bad dilemma of doing them in parallel (leading to a merge conflict with yourself yuck), or doing them in series which leads to the question of whether you should twiddle your thumbs while waiting for the first commit to get through review or whether you should do something else in the meantime risking forgetting the other commit.

That's why I don't think it's completely clear cut.

operator-name3• 2 years ago

What are the implications for a warrent to be served to the ethereum foundation? Unlike the last time[0], this is directed at the foundation rather than individual.

[0]: In 2019, Ethereum Foundation employee Virgil Griffith was arrested by the US government for presenting at a blockchain conference in North Korea. He would later plead guilty to one count of conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in 2021. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum)

RIMR2• 2 years ago

Ah, the same guy who created Tor2Web with Aaron Schwartz, and the immediately used it to try to sell deanonymized access logs to Tor hidden services to various governments.

kurisufag• 2 years ago

I'm familiar with the name because he made a fool of himself on the "King of the Nerds" reality/game show, which got chopped up for YouTube hilarity.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3ZEun2Auayo

diego_sandoval• 2 years ago

Commit message:

this commit removes a section of the footer as we have received a vol…

…untary enquiry from a state authority that included a requirement for confidentiality

hnarn• 2 years ago

I am not a lawyer, but just on the surface this seems to me like it's the complete opposite of a canary. If the whole point is that you're continually posting a "no" and you suddenly stop, that makes sense legally because it seems strange that you could coerce someone to keep doing something and lying, as that is not the same thing as "disclosing" something. Like, if you wore a green shirt every day and suddenly started wearing red, it makes sense to me why legally it would be hard to force someone to keep wearing green shirts.

This is nothing like that, the commit message itself is literally disclosing the fact that they have received an enquiry.

neilv5• 2 years ago

I'm always anti-canary. Two scenarios:

* You're suddenly under governmental orders not to disclose X. You remove a canary that says not-X, effectively disclosing X, and this was obviously your exact and pre-meditated intent. You then have to find a lawyer who will help you argue to a judge and other officials that you're in the clear with this loophole.

* You have a canary that says not-X, as an assurance to some other party. X happens, but you're also told at the same time that the folk wisdom you heard on the Internet about canaries will not protect you. So you don't remove the canary. Now your canary is falsely assuring that other party, betraying whatever trust they put in you, perhaps to their detriment.

supermatt2• 2 years ago

This is why you sign the canary regularly, and then it just expires if you do nothing.

Although... I also don't see much use in them either, it seems everyone ends up complying with something eventually and so all canaries end up getting removed.

djaykay• 2 years ago

That doesn’t seem functionally different than removing the canary.

neilv5• 2 years ago

IANAL, but I'd think that hurting your possible future defense is what you just said, and what people always say: that the premeditated intent is to violate a potential future gag, and that removing the canary (or not updating a cryptographic signature, or resetting to 0 the "__ days since last served a subpoena" notice) is a mechanism for that violation.

IMHO, that's kinda a weaselly trick, no matter how good the cause, and it might not stand up, not legally, nor in extra-legal practice.

hk1337• 2 years ago

Doing it with HTML, CSS, and an SVG icon seems odd. Having it in your privacy policy document or something similar seems more appropriate then you're just updating your privacy policy.

karaterobot• 2 years ago

In this case, they mentioned the involvement of a confidential state agency in the commit message, so it does not seem like there is a gag order per se, at least not a very broad one.

And to my knowledge, warrant canaries haven't been tested in U.S. courts, so the zeroth (and possibly most common) scenario would just be that you remove the canary and nothing happens to you, and the canary works as intended.

rsync• 2 years ago

I know a little something about these kind of mechanisms.

Neither of your scenarios seem problematic:

"You then have to find a lawyer who will help you argue to a judge and other officials that you're in the clear with this loophole."

Presumably the same lawyer(s) you've already retained for the purpose of defending the canary (and other things). Defending the canary in court (under US 1A law regime) is the entire point.

Also note that in the de facto standard canary process[1] you don't remove the canary (as that would be a positive, intentional act of speech). You simply stop updating it.

"So you don't remove the canary."

Again, under no scenario do you remove the canary - you simply stop updating it.

[1] "Special note should be taken if these messages ever cease being updated, or are removed from this page."

neilv5• 2 years ago

Something I don't understand...

I imagine that canary questions sometimes come up in non-publicly-disclosed legal proceedings, as well as in the occasional extra-legal practice.

If that actually does happen, and canaries ever failed to stand up in them, then how many lawyers would ever be in a position to hear about those failures, such that the lawyer could competently advise clients how to use canaries successfully?

Would the lawyer have to have been the veteran top litigator who handled the situations that reached the ear of the ACLU, or who previously worked on those situations on behalf of some facet of government?

Or is there sufficiently binding official assurance from government that canaries done a certain way are OK, no matter what happens in some non-public meeting?

(BTW, I really like your company. Though, as much as its canary looked like probably a signal of principled old-school Internet techie values, it also looked like potentially a bit of a magnet for trouble, in business it might attract, and in who it might antagonize. The tech choices there seem be heavy on minimizing risk of IT drama, but the canary seemed to flirt with drama.)

thraxil• 2 years ago

This is fair given what Ethereum just did. But, IMO, that's not what I expect if someone says "warrant canary". Under the "original" sense of canaries, your scenarios wouldn't make sense. Unfortunately, this new, wrong interpretation of the original idea seems to have become more common.

The original idea was that on some regular cadence (say weekly), you actively post a (hopefully signed) message somewhere saying "I hereby attest that, as of <insert current date>, we have not received any warrants/subpeonas/etc and are not subject to any gag orders, etc. etc.". (eg, rsync.net's canary: https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt). You have to set it up so that someone has to actually go and do something for the updated canary to go up, so it's like a dead man's switch. If you ever stop posting those, that's the signal to users that something is up.

That approach is extremely robust legally. In the US at least, publicly posting a digitally signed message asserting something presumably important and valuable about your business that's knowingly a lie would be considered false advertising, wire fraud, etc. depending on the exact situation. The government has a lot of power to legally compel you to not do things that would otherwise be legal (eg, uttering the speech "we just got a subpeona for all of your data!"). What they absolutely cannot legally do is compel you to do something illegal. Eg, they can't make you commit wire fraud by actively lying to your customers about the services you provide. That's a very strong legal position and you wouldn't have a hard time getting a lawyer to back you up on it.

Basically, if your "canary" requires you to "take down" something, it's not a proper canary and, yeah, I wouldn't trust it to protect you from much.

pests• 2 years ago

That worked well for Joseph Nacchio.

mcint• 2 years ago

I bet there's a great organization that works on defending civil liberties in the digital world. It turns out they have an article on this, from a full decade ago. It also covers who else is using canaries, and existing, highly limited, precedent for compelled speech.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/warrant-canary-faq

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/canary-watch-one-year-...

duxup• 2 years ago

I suppose this IS the canary ... the removal of it ?

ETH_start• 2 years ago

On the one hand, Congress' anti-crypto contingent is raising alarm over Bitcoin's energy consumption.

On the other hand, they are calling on their allies in the SEC to reject the Ethereum ETF, while the SEC is using Ethereum's transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake — which reduced its energy consumption by 99.99% — as the legal justification to designate Ethereum a security and thereby severely reduce the market's access to it.

"US Congressional Group ‘Disturbed’ by Crypto Mining Energy Usage" https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/07/15/congressional-gro...

"Democrats to SEC: Don't approve spot Ethereum ETFs and any other crypto ETPs" https://www.theblock.co/post/282846/democrats-to-sec-just-sa...

"According to a person at a company who received a recent subpoena request, the SEC’s probe of the Swiss-based Ethereum Foundation began shortly after the blockchain’s shift to a new governance model known as “proof-of-stake” in September of 2022." https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/03/20/sec-gary-gensler-ether...

Entwickler• 2 years ago

Exactly this. At the end of the day it seems like it's more about control than actually helping society...

taxmeifyoucan• 2 years ago

Great point, they are ridiculous

quazar• 2 years ago

Why is this not on the front page? Are people flagging this? Why?

ynx• 2 years ago

Hard not to get all conspiracy theorist about canary removals.

If I were to don my tinfoil hat, it seems possible to remove the canary with a boring incident for plausible deniability of a prior incident whose confidentiality is more strictly enforced.

The stricter gag order gets what it wants - non-disclosure of that particular gag order, the canary gets what it wants - removal after an incident.

mklarmann• 2 years ago

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has launched a probe into Ethereum to determine whether the largest altcoin is a security, Fortune reported.

The SEC sent subpoenas to companies seeking documents and financial records relating to their dealings with the Ethereum Foundation, the story said, citing companies that have received SEC subpoenas.

Ethereum Foundation removes their canary

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