CanaryWriter

A CLI tool for creating signed warrant canaries.

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Table of Contents

1. About CanaryWriter
2. Prerequisites
3. Usage
4. Contributing
5. License

About CanaryWriter

We have to admit, creating warrant canaries can be long (especially if you have to do it often). We created CanaryWriter to help people create signed warrant canaries easily. We use CanaryWriter in-house to create our own warrant canaries. You can check them out here!

What are warrant canaries?

A warrant canary is a colloquial term for a regularly published statement that a service provider has not received legal process that it would be prohibited from saying it had received. Once a service provider does receive legal process, the speech prohibition goes into place, and the canary statement is removed.

Warrant canaries are often provided in conjunction with a transparency report, listing the process the service provider can publicly say it received over the course of a particular time period. The canary is a reference to the canaries used to provide warnings in coalmines, which would become sick before miners from carbon monoxide poisoning, warning of the danger.

~ Electronic Frontier Foundation

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Prerequisites

To use CanaryWriter, you'll need to install a few packages. We recommend using Homebrew to do this.

• rsstail

  brew install rsstail

• gnupg

  brew install gnupg

  You'll also need to create or import a PGP key to sign your warrant canaries. Information on how to do this can be found here.

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Usage

• Download the contents of this repository (preferably using git).

  git clone https://github.com/DELVES/CanaryWriter.git

• Change directory to the location where you downloaded CanaryWriter.

  cd /users/rickastley/Downloads/CanaryWriter/

• Fill out signers.txt, statement.txt and announcements.txt with relevant information in your preferred text editor (e.g nano).

  nano statement.txt

• Run CanaryWriter and follow the onscreen instructions.

  ./canarywriter.sh

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Contributing

Contributions are what make the open source community such an amazing place to learn, inspire, and create. Any contributions you make are greatly appreciated.

If you have a suggestion that could make CanaryWriter better, please fork the repo and create a pull request. You can also simply open an issue with the tag "enhancement". Don't forget to give the project a star! Thanks again!

1. Fork the Project
2. Create your Feature Branch (git checkout -b feature/AmazingFeature)
3. Commit your Changes (git commit -m 'Add some AmazingFeature')
4. Push to the Branch (git push origin feature/AmazingFeature)
5. Open a Pull Request

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License

Distributed under The GNU General Public License v3.0. See LICENSE.txt for more information.

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