I thought it was the warrant canary of their email provider (Riseup) that died in 2016. Did Wikileaks ever even have a canary?
Riseup currently has a canary[1], they state that it would not trigger for "gag orders, FISA court orders, National Security Letters" which seems like it makes it pretty useless.
This says nothing about it being a canary. All canaries are stated as such.
Instead, all I see is some debate about PGP.
I can believe that only one submission ever used it. PGP is not friendly to people who barely undersrand how computers work (99.999% of the population), and some panicking whistleblower isn't interested in taking a layman's course in crypto to send some docs.
So why would wikileaks renew their useless(from their perspective) PGP key?
I would have to dig up a decade old computer or scour the web for years. THis is nonsense. It's 100% true that Wikileaks has a cryptographic canary that expired sometime after Julian Assange was incarcerated.
Forgive me, I've never heard of a "cryptographic canary." Google tuned up nothing for me about what it is or how it relates to wikileaks. It gave me the strong impression of being nonsense. Perhaps I'm wrong about that.
Have you got a link for what it is?
My prior is that any evidence of substance that contributed to a belief in wikileaks being untrustworthy would be /very/ easy to find in many locations. Maybe it's not but I can't think why. Perhaps you know?
A canary goes something like "This website has not received or acted on any government orders to disclose or modify or remove material." When they ever do, then they remove that notice. The government enforcement usually includes a gag order prohibiting the target from saying that they're under orders, so the intent is that you can infer government gag pressure by the canary having been removed. Wikileaks used to have such a notice and no longer does, so we assume government enforcement is why.
I'm not sure what the cryptographic part has to do with anything. I'd guess it was signed in a way that you can verify the government itself didn't tamper with the notice.
Wikileaks information was trustworthy and accurate. It may still be that the information prior to their canary expiring is okay, but anything released after can't be trusted.
I'd assume that once the canary died whichever actors compromised them scrubbed it.
It's been over a decade now, but I do have a machine somewhere with evidence.
Some nerd bigger than me here certainly has evidence available in a dropbox or somewhere accessible. I don't.
