Also called Sneak and Peeks the law enforcement community is sometimes permitted to search a persons place or things without telling them. In certain cases, such as library records or your off site data storage provider, the LE agent will issue a gag order so no one will know they were searched. One of these SSPs (storage service provider) has an interesting “canary” to help their users know when privacy has been violated.
The idea is simple. They sign a notice (cryptographically) with a snippet of text from a news site to validate the timestamp stating no government agents have made a search against any users data. If the message is not updated then something has gone wrong.
There is an obvious weakness which even they acknowledge. “Signing the declaration makes it impossible for a third party to produce arbitrary declarations, it does not prevent them from using force to coerce rsync.net to produce false declarations.” [rsync.net]
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