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A warrant canary is a signed statement asserting that no secret subpoenas, National Security Letters, gag orders, or classified court orders (such as those from the FISA Court) have been received by Backyard Bandwidth as of the date listed.
Due to legal restrictions, service providers may be prohibited from disclosing the existence of such government requests. However, they are not required to continuously confirm the absence of them. This creates a loophole: by publishing a signed, dated statement saying that no such orders have been received, users can monitor that statement over time. If the canary is ever removed, altered, or not updated as expected, it may be a silent indication that the provider has been served with a secret order and is legally unable to say so directly.
To verify the authenticity of our canary, it is digitally signed with our PGP key. You can check the signature using any PGP tool to confirm it was issued by us and has not been tampered with.
Download the files:
wget https://backyardbandwidth.com/data/canary.json wget https://backyardbandwidth.com/data/canary.sig wget https://backyardbandwidth.com/data/pubkey.asc
Import the PGP key:
gpg --import pubkey.asc
Verify the signature:
gpg --verify canary.sig canary.json
Match the fingerprint with the expected value:
cat fingerprint.txt