Courts can't compel you not to talk. They can merely punish you after-the-fact.

So if you're talking about "everyone in a giant group of people" and doing it routinely, existence of those secret subpoenas seem like they'd get leaked eventually. Especially if it's hard to tell which of the 300 people leaked it.

Any of these TLAs will love figuring out who leaked it, and it usually isn’t hard.

And knowing this, the jail time or personal life destruction that would almost inevitably occur isn’t worth it for almost anyone.

Can you just shutdown your nodes or can they force you to continue? Best practice for relay operators is to just stop the operation altogether if the authorities force you to attack the users.

They could probably compel you to continue, or forcibly take over the node. Once you're in NSL "we can do anything we want and you can't tell anyone about it" land, being prevented from shutting down your own business or service isn't terribly far-fetched.

The government cannot anyone to work without pay.

This seems obvious but it is a constitutional right that has been cited as a reason to not comply with extra-judicial pressure to assist the government with an investigation.

This is why some projects do not accept donations and have a canary.

Had the authors of Truecrypt been paid, they could had been compelled to modify their source code to the government's will.

By not accepting payment, they are protecting themselves.

https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/what-defense-production-act grants the US government significant control over the US economy and businesses. As it turns out, we're still at war :-)

> the government cannot force anything to work without pay

but they can force people to work with pay https://www.wbay.com/2022/01/20/thedacare-seeks-court-order-...

> it is a constitutional right

Ahem... "terrorism!"

Poof! Now your Constitutional rights no longer exist.

I know this is possible for organizations in the US, but for private persons too?

Aren't there warrant canaries set up to prevent this? Every website that can be compelled to behave that way should have one.

How could a warrant canary work when you don't know which exit node you will connect to?

> Aren't there warrant canaries set up to prevent this?

No, because the police will tell you to not tell anyone about the court order. If you do so (for example using a warrant canary), you will be in big trouble. Those canaries were always a convenient fiction, almost to the point of it being entirely in question whether or not this fiction was created in good faith.

You can always be in trouble by the police for any reason or no reason at all. The question is law. The notion of a warrant canary is that the police cannot compel you to state that you are not under a court order. They can annoy you to lie, and they can always break the law, but they cannot legally force you to. To claim that regardless of this, the police can compel you to lie, is tantamount to saying that the rule of law has failed.

( https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/warrant-canary-faq )

> To claim that regardless of this, the police can compel you to lie, is tantamount to saying that the rule of law has failed.

Your life quality will take a sharp negative dive if you don't conform to the spirit of what they ask you. Whether or not such things are legal really is immaterial: You will be in trouble anyway. As such, I dislike advice that leans on what the law says.

Has this ever been tested in court?

Not to my knowledge.

Which can mean "no company has tried" or "no TLA has tried".

They cannot compel someone to re-authorize a deadman switches' canary.

If the canary doesn't receive a signed message within X amount of days, the canary sings.

Nobody can force someone to do work or self-incriminate.

Can those warrant canaries holders who follow police/court orders, be sued for false advertising?

Seems like a catch 22 that it's a lose-lose.

If being sued for false advertising was a real risk, advertising would be a lot more truthful :)