Comment by Myrmornis

I gather from stuff like the quote on Wikipedia pasted below that there is doubt about the protection from prosecution that canaries give you. But I'm finding that hard to believe. What about if it's literally a picture of a canary you remove, rather than any actual sentences, and you don't say anything about it? Or you change it to a cardinal (red) one day? Or you give a string of 1s and 0s with the understanding that the proportion of 1s should be interpreted as the probability that you've been subpoenad? Would the court's decision depend on the belief in the general population about the semantics of the page decorations?

  Bruce Schneier wrote in a blog post that "[p]ersonally,
  I have never believed [warrant canaries] would work. It
  relies on the fact that a prohibition against speaking
  doesn't prevent someone from not speaking. But courts
  generally aren't impressed by this sort of thing