Canary Statement

noun

1… A small songbird in the finch family, serinus canaria domestica, originally native to islands in the North Atlantic.

2… A mechanism to test for unsafe conditions, originating from the use of canaries in coal mines to detect poisonous gases or cave-ins. If the canary died, it was time to get out of the mine. More recently, the term has been used by some online service providers to refer to an affirmative statement, updated regularly, that the provider has not been subjected to certain legal processes. If the statement is not updated in a timely fashion, users may infer that the canary statement may no longer be true.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

Riseup positively confirms that the integrity of our system is sound: all our infrastructure is in our control, we have not been compromised or suffered a data breach, we have not disclosed any private encryption keys, and we have not been forced to modify our system to allow access or information leakage to a third party.

This canary will be re-signed on the following dates:

* February 1
* May 1
* August 1
* November 1

We will include a link to a recent news article[1] in each update to establish that the signature was not pre-generated.

h2. Frequently asked questions

Q: Are you compromised by law enforcement?

A: No. We have never permitted installation of any hardware or software monitoring on any system that we control; law enforcement has not taken our servers; does not, and has never had access to them. We would rather stop being Riseup before we did that.

Q: Couldn't the government just make you say that?

A: Forced speech is actually quite rare in the US legal context. It's usually only in cases of consumer protection where the government has been successful in compelling speech (e.g. forced cigarette warnings). Nevertheless, no they aren't forcing us to say anything.

Q: Why didn't you update your canary on time in the winter of 2016?

A: The canary was so broad that any attempt to issue a new one would be a violation of a gag order related to an investigation into a DDoS extortion ring and ransomware operation[0]. This is not desirable, because if any one of a number of minor things happen, it signals to users that a major thing has happened.

Q: Why does the new Canary not mention gag orders, FISA court orders, National Security Letters, etc?

A: Our initial Canary strategy was only harming users by freaking them out unnecessarily when minor events happened. A Canary is supposed to signal important risk information to users, but there is also danger in signaling the wrong thing to users or leading to general fear and confusion for no good reason. The current Canary is limited to significant events that could compromise the security of Riseup users.

0. https://riseup.net/about-us/press/canary-statement
1. https://theintercept.com/2017/05/01/cybersecurity-for-the-people-how-to-keep-your-chats-truly-private-with-signal/

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Verification instructions

You should follow these instructions to download riseup’s gpg key and verify the keyid. Then you may follow these steps to verify this statement:

Download the signed canary statement
Then run this command in a terminal:
gpg --verify canary-statement-signed.txt
You should get output that is similar to the following (note the date will change, based on when the canary statement was signed):

gpg: Signature made Thu 16 Feb 2017 05:41:25 PM EST
gpg:                using RSA key 4E0791268F7C67EABE88F1B03043E2B7139A768E
gpg: Good signature from "Riseup Networks <collective@riseup.net>"
Primary key fingerprint: 4E07 9126 8F7C 67EA BE88  F1B0 3043 E2B7 139A 768E

You should make sure that it says “Good signature” in the output and confirm that the keyid matches the one you verified here earlier. If this text has been altered, then this information should not be trusted.