Warrant Canary 2016-04-01

Up at the top right corner of this web site, you should see a new yellow square with a canary icon in it. This links to a page here at snork.ca which is intended to serve as a warning if there is ever a formal request for data from the infrastructure that hosts this web site, as well as some other services (most notably email). The idea is that if I/we ever receive a request for the data that lives on this server then I would update that page with whatever information I can. If a gag order were included with the request, then I simply would not be able to keep updating that page with new dates. This would serve as a hint that perhaps I had received such a request.

Thumbs up!.

I found out about this practice today when I heard about Reddit apparently not putting their "canary" in their annual transparency report for 2015. This means it is possible that Reddit has received some form of request for Reddit user data, and that it likely came with some form of gag order. While I understand that snork.ca is not as high profile as Reddit, I think it is still important to err on the side of privacy.

I should also note that I stole the canary icon from the canarywatch.org web site, I hope they are not bothered by that (I didn't see any links to logos for public use) and I hope they add me to their list.