Word.ws English Dictionary

warrant canary

warrant canary noun: a public notice that a service provider has not received a secret government subpoena for their customers' data that they would be prohibited from saying they had received.

Noun

warrant canary (plural warrant canaries)

  1. (US) A public notice that a service provider has not received a secret government subpoena for their customers' data that they would be prohibited from saying they had received.
    • However, it may be possible, via a warrant canary or a similar technique, for a CA to communicate the existence of a secret court order to the Internet community.2012 July 9, Markus Jakobsson, editors, The Death of the Internet, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 159
    • Warrant canaries are legal tricks employed by conscientious organisations to get around the fact that certain demands from the US government cannot be disclosed publicly.2014 May 30, Alex Hern, “Encryption software TrueCrypt closes doors in odd circumstances”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Forms of warrant canary

pluralwarrant canaries

Origin of warrant canary

Allusion to a miner's canary.

Questions about warrant canary

What does warrant canary mean?
Warrant canary means a public notice that a service provider has not received a secret government subpoena for their customers' data that they would be prohibited from saying they had received.
What part of speech is warrant canary?
Warrant canary is a noun.
What is the plural of warrant canary?
The plural of warrant canary is warrant canaries.

Words near warrant canary in the dictionary

  1. Warrandyte
  2. Warrandyte South
  3. Warrane
  4. warrant
  5. warrant canaries
  6. warrant canary
  7. warrant card
  8. warrant cards
  9. warrant of arrest
  10. warrant of attorney
  11. warrant of fitness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: warrant canary (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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