Re:Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries
by LinuxBender on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @12:16PM
(#19264827)
That is basically what I am saying. Unless all of this is tied into a counter-signed contract, it is all rather meaningless. I would suggest that almost nobody has such an agreement with their end user service providers.
I am no lawyer, but I don't see a problem with putting a lie into a financial statement that is in no way related to financial data. It would just be disregarded as unrelated to financial reporting. I am also not aware of any companies doing this. I could see this causing a deeper dive into an audit however.
The canary does not protect you against the service provider and nobody has claimed that. The theory is that it protects you against NSLs that would otherwise force the service provider to not disclose the NSL.
Sometimes a canary is attached to a public financial report or something else that it is already illegal to lie in, so that would require the government to compel you to break a separate law.
It seems like you are thinking of canaries in the engineering, cryptographic or social sense, in which case the are useless. They only have purpose in a legal sense as a literal "canary in the coalmine".