warrant canary

plural warrant canaries

1. USA 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.

   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.

   2012 July 9, Markus Jakobsson, editors, The Death of the Internet, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 159

   2 more examples

   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 May 30, Alex Hern, “Encryption software TrueCrypt closes doors in odd circumstances”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

   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.”

   2014 July 25, Jacob Long, “Exclusive: Private Internet Access talks warrants, canaries, transparency”, in Geeksided, archived from the original on 03 Aug 2014