A lot of commenters seem to be dancing around a fact which seems to me to be obvious: Silent Circle has received a warrant. This is simple. If Silent Circle had

A lot of commenters seem to be dancing around a fact which seems to me to be obvious: Silent Circle has received a warrant. This is simple. If Silent Circle had not received a warrant, their canary would state as much, as promised. It does not. Ergo, Silent Circle has received a warrant. That much is, in my mind, nearly certain. On the other hand, what follows is speculation (IANAL): The problems back in December in fact occurred on receipt of a warrant by Silent Circle. The first attempt by Silent Circle of not updating their canary was shot down by a judge. However, said judge did not go so far as to actually order them to make a false statement, as that's clearly unconstitutional (of course, judges might act unconstitutionally, but perhaps "judge" here could be read to mean, "the agreed compromise of the court pending appeal", etc.; it doesn't matter one way or the other). However, the rest of the warrant canary is not false, and therefore it's conceivable that the court could feel justified in ordering SC to update it, and the government could correctly predict that there is value in having the canary updated even without the declaration, since it sows confusion among those watching the canary. If that is the case, then what we would see is a warrant canary just as it existed before, except lacking the (now false) declaration. The updated canary, lack of declaration, and confusion sown by that are in fact precisely what we observe now. The ambiguous statements by SC after December are consistent with this view. Their legal counsel could feel that even if asked directly "have you received a warrant", it may be necessary to lie in order to guarantee that it does not seem like they've made a speech act stating that they have in fact received a warrant. If this is all the case, then I feel sorry for the SC guys, since it must be terribly frustrating to be gagged, but to have executed precisely as planned this apparently effective warrant canary strategy, and then to have everyone else, instead of understanding what is going on, quibble over what it means that the declaration is missing and basically claim "the warrant canary didn't work" when it's working exactly the way we expected it to work! Luckily, assuming all this is true, presumably the people who are in positions to really care about this sort of thing also share this understanding, and (unlike a nobody like me) they're just smart enough to keep their mouths shut for SC's sake, since this is a legal tightrope by any account. If the public/the community seems to understand completely the meaning of the warrant canary, then that would give the gov't leverage to either claim that SC should be punished for it or, worse, to force SC to make a false speech act and put the declaration back in. Certainly if I ever see that declaration come back, I will assume that a US court has done the unthinkable and ordered citizens to make a knowingly false statement against their will.