Today I imported posts I’d written for the Stack Overflow blog onto my blog. Most of them are end-of-year review posts so I’ve been thinking about how that job changed from how it started.1 By the time I left Stack Overflow, it was clear the company had experienced mission creep and “[helping] coders help each other become better coders by sharing their knowledge with one another” was no longer the top priority.

In the new year I will start work at OpenSSL, which has a very clear mission statement. Reading the Foundation’s annual report reminds me of the salad days of Stack Overflow when everyone recognized that success depended on strangers answering each others’ questions. A difference is that OpenSSL has maintained it’s focus for 25 years.2 Having met the OpenSSL Foundation team, I strongly believe them to be upright and effective custodians of the mission.

Still, there are always risks. For instance:

  • Quantum computing could trivialize the mathematical problems that form the foundation of modern cryptography.3
  • A government could discover a flaw in the library and take actions to prevent the flaw from being fixed or disclosed.
  • Some other mission could take priority or resources away from the current mission.

Conflicted loyalty is an occupational hazard of community management. While open communication is ideal, there can be times when it’s not possible or even counterproductive. So I’ve decided to set up a warrant canary that says (as of the time of writing):

I warrant that the OpenSSL Foundation is effectively pursuing its mission:

We believe everyone should have access to security and privacy tools, whoever they are, wherever they are or whatever their personal beliefs are, as a fundamental human right.

Traditionally a warrant canary allows a service to communicate indirectly that an event has occurred which might impinge on users’ privacy. Usually it anticipates a warrant that requires an organization to turn over data to some law-enforcement agency. That eventuality seems unlikely for OpenSSL, so maybe it’s not the best name. Still, it has a very similar function. If I ever discover that my statement is wrong, misleading or over-taken-by-events, I will edit or delete the canary, which is an invitation for interested parties to investigate.

For what it’s worth, the most likely outcomes are, in order:

  1. I won’t do anything with the canary because I leave OpenSSL without any cause to change it.
  2. I’ll be able to report potential issues publicly and the canary will be redundant.
  3. My site will break when I do a periodic upgrade and the canary will send a false alarm.
  4. Nobody will notice when I change the canary.
  5. Nothing can be done about whatever I’m warning about.
  6. My canary sacrifices itself for the public good.

The last outcome seems worth the minimal effort.

  1. That I’m taking the time to preserve these posts is a sign that I’ve lost trust in the organization I was so proud to be joining a decade ago. ↩

  2. Based on the method I use for calculating the destruction of civilization via nuclear war, I’m estimating there’s a ~10% chance of catastrophic failure this year and the median time to failure at 6ish years. ↩

  3. By the way, this could be an end-of-civilization scenario given our dependence on internet commerce and communication.  ↩