The canary, and what its silence would mean.
A canary is a statement we are still able to make. All of its value sits in the day it stops appearing, which makes the schedule more interesting than the text.
What a canary is, and what it is not
The mechanism is crude to the point of being elegant. We publish a signed statement asserting that a list of things has not happened, and if one of them happens while we are forbidden from saying so, we stop publishing rather than lie. The absence then carries the information the statement no longer can.
It is not a legal instrument and nobody should treat it as one. Some authorities can compel speech as readily as they can forbid it, and a canary is a weak defence against that. What it does reliably is remove the option of quiet compliance: keeping this page current after a sealed order would require deliberately signing a false statement with a key we control.
Read it as one signal among several. The retention table matters more, because it caps what could be handed over before any of this becomes relevant.
What ours asserts
Seven clauses. Each is a thing that has not happened, worded so that it cannot be true in some weaker sense.
No secret order
No warrant, subpoena or production order has been received that we are prohibited from disclosing.
No gag
No non-disclosure direction has been served on us or on anybody working for us.
No interception
Nobody has asked us to tap a port, mirror traffic, or install monitoring on any host in any site.
No key demand
No demand has been made for encryption keys, for signing keys, or for a means of getting around either.
No seizure
No equipment has been seized, and no facility we use has been searched.
No change of control
Operational control of the network sits with the same people it did last month.
No instruction about this page
Nobody has asked us to alter, delay or remove this canary.
Clause seven is the one that matters most, and it is also the one an authority would be likeliest to try. That is why it stands on its own rather than being folded into the others.
The current statement
Statement forty-two. Signed 1 August 2026.
Statement number forty-two, covering 1 July 2026 to 31 July 2026, signed on 1 August 2026.
As at the date of signature, and throughout the period above: we have received no warrant, subpoena, production order or other legal demand that we are prohibited from disclosing. No non-disclosure direction has been served on us. Nobody has requested the interception, mirroring or monitoring of customer traffic on any host at any site we operate. No demand has been made for encryption keys or for any means of circumventing them. Nothing has been seized, and no facility we use has been searched. Operational control of the network is unchanged. No party has asked us to alter, delay or remove this statement.
This text is signed with the operations key whose fingerprint is published in the footer of every page on this site and in the key block linked beside this statement. It quotes the hash of a recent block from a public chain, which is what prevents it from being written in advance of the date it carries.
The next statement is due on 1 September 2026. Should it not have appeared by 8 September 2026, treat the delay as meaningful and read the section below.
The schedule, and what late means
Signed on the first of the month, published within the hour, with a grace period stated in advance so that nobody has to guess what counts as late.
On the first
Every month since March 2023 without exception. Forty-two statements, all still published, all still verifiable against the key that signed them.
Seven days of grace
Illness, travel and one memorably broken deploy pipeline have each cost a few hours in the past. Seven days is the published margin and two of them is the most we have ever used.
After the eighth day
Assume the statement could not be made. Do not assume which clause failed, because an absence does not tell you that and guessing publicly helps nobody.
A clause that quietly vanishes
Read the diff rather than the prose. Every previous statement stays on this page precisely so that a missing sentence is obvious to anybody comparing two of them.
What we would do
Nothing announced in advance beyond this: we will not sign a statement known to be false, and we will not leave an old one standing as though it were current.
Verifying it yourself
- 01
Fetch the key
Linked beside the statement, with the fingerprint repeated in the site footer. Compare it against a copy obtained on a different day, ideally over a different network.
- 02
Fetch the detached signature
One file per statement, published alongside the text and never edited afterwards. Old signatures stay exactly as they were.
- 03
Verify against the file
Run the verification against the published statement file, whitespace and all. A failure means the text changed after signing, which is worth both a ticket and a public complaint.
- 04
Check the block reference
The hash quoted in the statement belongs to a block mined shortly before the signature date. Any public explorer will confirm the timing in a few seconds.
- 05
Keep your own copies
Archive the statements as they appear. A canary you only ever read on our website is a canary we could quietly rewrite.
The exact verification command, with the flags that matter, is in the knowledge base. Nearly every failure reported to us turns out to be a verification run against a copy the browser has helpfully reflowed.
Read the diff before you read the prose.
Every statement since March 2023 sits on this page in the order it was signed. A useful review takes about two minutes and consists mostly of checking that nothing has gone missing.