Even if every exit node in the US is operated by private people or organizations, courts can compel the node owners to work with the government and not talk about it.
Courts can't compel you not to talk. They can merely punish you after-the-fact.
So if you're talking about "everyone in a giant group of people" and doing it routinely, existence of those secret subpoenas seem like they'd get leaked eventually. Especially if it's hard to tell which of the 300 people leaked it.
Can you just shutdown your nodes or can they force you to continue? Best practice for relay operators is to just stop the operation altogether if the authorities force you to attack the users.
They could probably compel you to continue, or forcibly take over the node. Once you're in NSL "we can do anything we want and you can't tell anyone about it" land, being prevented from shutting down your own business or service isn't terribly far-fetched.
This seems obvious but it is a constitutional right that has been cited as a reason to not comply with extra-judicial pressure to assist the government with an investigation.
This is why some projects do not accept donations and have a canary.
Had the authors of Truecrypt been paid, they could had been compelled to modify their source code to the government's will.
By not accepting payment, they are protecting themselves.
> Aren't there warrant canaries set up to prevent this?
No, because the police will tell you to not tell anyone about the court order. If you do so (for example using a warrant canary), you will be in big trouble. Those canaries were always a convenient fiction, almost to the point of it being entirely in question whether or not this fiction was created in good faith.
You can always be in trouble by the police for any reason or no reason at all. The question is law. The notion of a warrant canary is that the police cannot compel you to state that you are not under a court order. They can annoy you to lie, and they can always break the law, but they cannot legally force you to. To claim that regardless of this, the police can compel you to lie, is tantamount to saying that the rule of law has failed.
> To claim that regardless of this, the police can compel you to lie, is tantamount to saying that the rule of law has failed.
Your life quality will take a sharp negative dive if you don't conform to the spirit of what they ask you. Whether or not such things are legal really is immaterial: You will be in trouble anyway. As such, I dislike advice that leans on what the law says.
