Good day,
I was thinking precisely the same thing when I read their last post…
Maybe, just maybe birds aren’t the best conversation piece, keeping in mind what meaning they are supposed to imply. I mean, to a degree I could understand why they are fixated on these animals. Birds have been a representation of freedom for centuries and they’ve prominently been a part of Riseups “brand identity” since the beginning of 2014 when birds were first incorporated into Riseup’s webpage and some of their logo’s. Making a “fun” reference thus isn’t incredibly unreasonable, IF their hasn’t just been confusion about their warrant canary, something integral to their operation commonly associated with birds.
The fact that someone at Riseup thought it was a good idea to start posting about listening “to the hummingbird” AFTER their warrant canary RAN OUT, is in the best case scenario one of the worst cases of timing I’ve ever seen. The fact that they still haven’t diffused the situation by talking openly about their “laid-back” approach to updating the canary and that they didn’t tweet about birds beforehand, when now it seems to be their only topic doesn’t even need to be mentioned at that case.
Adding to that, their (preemptive) response was neither polite, nor appropriate, as THEY THEMSELFES are responsilbe for the criticism leveled at them. Furthermore, their next tweet was even more worrisome to me:
since 1999 we have been doing a lot of work to keep everyone data safe according to the needs of our movements.
Well, yes, you certainly seem to have. Though, just being in “the business” for a long time doesn’t make you immune from criticism, mistakes, or NSL’s. And, not doing anything to improve the situation (like setting fixed times for canaries) certainly doesn’t make you look like people that have been doing this “since 1999”.
Adding to all of that and this is probably the most worrisome thing here, their canary hasn’t been updated for 153 days/5 months OR IN OTHER WORDS ALMOST HALF A BLOODY YEAR!!!
As someone who has a similar AGE TO THEIR SERVICE, even I know that that’s quite a problem.
I was actually unaware of the fact that they still didn’t fix their canary, as I only figured out now. There is no (positive) reason for it to be this outdated. In that intercept article they tweeted a few MONTHS AGO, they said that the only issue with updating the canary was thanksgiving and some bad planning. I have a hard time believing that in retrospective.
Have a nice day,
Ego