Law Enforcement Transparency

Current Policy

Permanent does not currently have any working relationships established with law enforcement agencies. Nor do we have any strategic plans to establish such partnerships with law enforcement agencies in the future.

Our mission is digital preservation for the educational and historical benefit of future generations, not for law enforcement.

However, we make no guarantees that we would never make any user data accessible to law enforcement under certain ethical or legal requirements.

Permanent will seek legal counsel when considering formal requests from law enforcement such as subpoenas, court orders, or warrants on a case by case basis and will cooperate as required under the law.

Permanent will also consider emergency disclosure requests if there is credible evidence of an imminent life-threatening circumstance and information is required without delay.

Transparency Reporting

Many technology companies release yearly transparency reports to share critical law enforcement action with their users (ex. also Reddit). Given our current size and the lack of any such action, we have not put into place a schedule for such reports.

However, we will release a warrant canary quarterly on this page. These kinds of canary statements are very limited in their ability to inform users and not a replacement for transparency reports, but they serve as the best level of detail we are able to provide at this time.

Following precedents set by services like rsync.net and riseup.net, our canary statements are composed of the following two components:

  • a declaration that, up to that point, no warrants have been served, nor have any searches or seizures taken place
  • a cut and paste headline from a major news source, establishing date

Special note should be taken if these messages ever cease being updated, or are removed from this page.

Warrant Canary

2020-06-08

No warrants have ever been served to Permanent.org, or Permanent.org principals or employees.

No known searches or seizures of any kind have ever been performed on Permanent.org assets held with storage and web hosting partners.

(from http://www.nytimes.com)

Despite Recession, Stock Markets Turn Positive for the Year
The S&P 500 climbed back above where it began the year on the same day that economists said the United States fell into a recession in February.

Defying Police Unions, New York Lawmakers Ban Chokeholds
Legislators, responding to protests over the death of George Floyd, are approving a package of bills aimed at police misconduct.

Notes

(borrowed from rsync.net):
This scheme is not infallible. Although signing the declaration makes it impossible for a third party to produce arbitrary declarations, it does not prevent them from using force to coerce rsync.net to produce false declarations. The news clip in the signed message serves to demonstrate that that update could not have been created prior to that date. It shows that a series of these updates were not created in advance and posted on this page.