On 2013-10-11 16:20, Yehuda Katz wrote:
Probably would not work (or would get whoever did that thrown in
jail). This is similar to a Warrant Canary, but the USDoJ has
indicated that Warrant Canaries would probably be grounds for
prosecution of violation of the non-disclosure order.
- Y
On Friday, October 11, 2013, Adrian Zaugg wrote:
Dear all
After having read the whole NSA thread on this list, it came up to my
mind that pfsense web GUI could declare itself "conform to US
laws" upon
the point when there are known backdoors included or otherwise the
code
was compromised on pressure of govermental authorities. It would
be the
sign for the users to review the code and maybe to fork an earlier
version and host it in a free country, where the protection of
personal
data is a common sense and national security is not so much an issue.
Regards, Adrian.
Hi Yehuda,
inspired by the keyword you dropped, I researched a little bit and
found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
It seems that you are correct: What Adrian suggests, is called a Warrant
canary.
In the wikipedia article it says that: "The intention is to allow the
provider to inform customers of the existence of a subpoena passively,
without violating any laws. The legality of this method has not been
tested in any court." Is that wrong or in conflict with what you wrote?
In the case that it would indeed be prosecuted in the USA, we could
consider to host the project in another country.
In this case it would be interesting to investigate what needs to be
hosted elsewhere: The source code versioning control system? The company
behind pfSense (ESF)?
I guess that the best solution would be to incorporate pfSense itself
and untie it from ESF. Many other free software projects have done so
recently. The most prominent example is Libre Office which is now
"owned" by the Document Foundation
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Foundation). The "owned" refers
to e.g. the brand name, since the software itself is free software, it
is not owned by anybody.
So summarizing:
If pfSense would be incorporated as a foundation at some place (many
countries would be possible) outside the USA, it could be a solution to
this I guess.
Regards
Thinker Rix
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