Warrant canary

The canary is singing. The current statement is dated 2 November 2026. The next one is due before 12 December 2026.

What this is

About once a month, r12d publishes a short statement, signed with our key, saying that we have not received any secret order from a government authority. The r12d logo on this site and on Fluck shows a yellow canary only while the latest statement is recent. If a statement isn't renewed within 40 days, the logo changes to a fallen canary on its own.

That's the point of the design. If we were ever ordered not to talk about an order, we wouldn't have to say anything, and we wouldn't change anything. We would just stop renewing the statement. There is no switch that marks the canary dead.

What the statement covers

• The r12d service (r12d.ch and app.r12d.ch) and Fluck (fluck.r12d.ch), and the person who operates them.
• Orders, warrants, subpoenas and requests from any government authority, in Switzerland or elsewhere, that come with an obligation not to disclose them.
• Orders to change our software or hand over keys so that users can be monitored.

What it doesn't cover

• Companies we rely on. Our hosting providers, network operators and email provider can be served orders about their own systems without our knowledge, and this statement can't speak for them.
• Requests we're allowed to talk about. Those we would rather disclose directly.

What a lapse means

A fallen canary means we could not, or did not, renew the statement in time. That might be because of an order we can't discuss. It might also be an ordinary mistake: an illness, a holiday, a broken deploy. We can't tell you which, and you shouldn't assume either. If the canary falls by mistake, we'll publish a fresh, signed statement as soon as we can, and say in it that the gap was an error.

Check it yourself

The statement is plain text, signed with OpenPGP:

• canary.txt, the current signed statement
• canary.asc, the public key it's signed with

curl -sO https://pr-13.r12d.dev/canary.txt -sO https://pr-13.r12d.dev/canary.asc
gpg --import canary.asc
gpg --verify canary.txt

A good signature and a recent date mean the statement is ours and current. A statement can be copied but not altered. The signing key isn't on the servers that run r12d, so someone who took over a server could change what the logo shows but couldn't sign a statement. Trust the signature, not the logo.

A warrant canary has never been tested in a Swiss or US court. It is a signal, not a guarantee.