Australia Outlaws Warrant Canaries

In the US, certain types of warrants can come with gag orders preventing the recipient from disclosing the existence of warrant to anyone else. A warrant canary is basically a legal hack of that prohibition. Instead of saying "I just received a warrant with a gag order," the potential recipient keeps repeating "I have not received any warrants." If the recipient stops saying that, the rest of us are supposed to assume that he has been served one.

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Australia has sidestepped all of this by outlawing warrant canaries entirely:

Section 182A of the new law says that a person commits an offense if he or she discloses or uses information about "the existence or non-existence of such a [journalist information] warrant." The penalty upon conviction is two years imprisonment.

Source

Another Link

A warrant canary is a method by which a communications service provider informs its users that the provider has not been served with a secret government subpoena. Secret subpoenas, including those covered under 18 U.S.C. §2709(c) of the USA Patriot Act, provide criminal penalties for disclosing the existence of the warrant to any third party, including the service provider's users.

Warrant Canary at Wiki

Not surprising. Almost surely coming to the US soon. Losing rights by association.

So in all this legalize, does this mean that the service providers must legally lie to you about all the warrants and back door snooping that goes on by governments and other approved organizations?

Thanks for the link Roadgravel, it seems not a day goes by that this government does not display some sort of fascist agenda.

There is one hope left in that the High Court will strike this down, but that is me being the optimist.

This probably has something to do with the metadata laws that are currently being legislated.

All ISP's and phone companies must hold the last two years of all your data, this will be a way that the government or security services can access this data discreetly.

originally posted by: roadgravel


Australia has sidestepped all of this by outlawing warrant canaries entirely:

Section 182A of the new law says that a person commits an offense if he or she discloses or uses information about "the existence or non-existence of such a [journalist information] warrant." The penalty upon conviction is two years imprisonment.

Not surprising. Almost surely coming to the US soon. Losing rights by association.

It certainly demonstrates that those who run the US also run Australia either directly or indirectly through proxies or by a combination of carrots and the stick.

It is well known that Australia is a "friend' or, slave of the US depending on your definition of "friend" in a political context, and when the US fired one of Australia's government in the 1970s. No politician dare speak out for fear of also being fired or fried.

a reply to: roadgravel

Regarding the penalty referred to in the legislation.

Notice how many penalties is a rubber stamp penalty. Part of my job involves reviewing new legislation and I have noticed that usually any security related law, has penalties expressed in fixed term rubber stamp penalties.

I have no doubt I will find this tendency drifting into all laws.

Rubber stamp laws are attempts by politicians to impose their will on the a section of the population which is those charged with offenses. Rubber stamp laws are successful attempts by small groups people, usually less than 200, in Australia anyway, to by-pass the courts and play judge and jury.

Rubber stamp laws are only ever just laws inside a very narrow range of circumstances. Outside this very narrow range of circumstances, rubber stamp laws are always unjust laws and, by extension, are always unjustly applied.

Australia outlawed the use of a certain kind of warrant canary in March of 2015, making it illegal for a journalist to "disclose information about the existence or non-existence" of a warrant issued under new mandatory data retention laws.

It is unlikely a journalist could give a correct canary in this situation anyway, as under this legislation the agency obtaining the warrant is not compelled to inform the journalist of the warrant.

This was posted on Wiki. Almost sounds like a catch-22. Abandoning a canary on a site could be viewed as the announcement of non-existence which is illegal. Taking it down after being served, whether intended to be informative or not, is illegal it seems.

Seems the idea is to make service providers into part of big brother. The providers helping to promote illegal activities on the net probably have more to worry over, if charge with criminal activity, then this law. Doubt they will care.

a reply to: roadgravel

"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH BECOMES A REVOLUTIONARY ACT."
-Orwell

And make no mistake, these truths must be told.

a reply to: Azureblue


I'm surprised their people have put up with it for so long. I bet they wish they wouldn't have voluntarily turned all of those firearms in though. Which is exactly what happens when you legislate your emotions after some tear-jerking incident in typical knee-jerk response.

Meanwhile, those seeking to impose "conditions incompatible with freedom and liberty" were merely waiting for said tear-jerker to occur on its own/staging it themselves via a false flag, and a certain portion of the population just lines up to give away their rights, little by little. All of this in exchange for some nebulous and demonstrably false self-assurance that "this" (the incident) will never happen again. Which of course is a rationalization since it will happen again. And no amount of surveillance or sacrificed liberty/freedom is going to change that fact, unfortunately. But lets not throw our values and core ideals out the window because of fear.

I say the cost of what they're selling is too damn high.