…any more?
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Which I’m sure is why Obama hangs out here from time to time. I would if I were pres!
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The more specific the canary gets the more likely it is to get them in trouble with the gag order. Because it gives basically no information makes it unlikely to piss off the Feds when it is triggered and makes it easier to defend.
Uh… because Reddit would then become a smoking hole in the ground where a few billion dollars in valuation used to be, and the people who pressed the SEND key on that message would be in jail faster than you could create r/warrantcanaryjailwatch.
The government shows no signs that it will allow itself to be fucked with on this point, and as troubling as secret warrants and the whole system built around them are, mere noncompliance isn’t going to work in this case, any more than the dudes up at the wildlife preserve in Idaho were going to take down the gummint with their shotguns and steely gazes.
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You can fight these things in court–secret court–but you can’t tell anyone you’re doing it, because that would be the same thing as telling people the thing you were prevented from telling them in the first place. (No, really.) It gets pretty Orwellian pretty fast, since most of the adversarial back-and-forth gets lost when one side doesn’t have clearance to rebut or even necessarily be told the other side’s argument.
That said, the First Amendment is a lousy shield in these things. There are a million different statutory or contractual restraints that can limit what information you’re allowed to communicate in particular situations, most of them pretty uncontroversial. Courts and cops have always been able to compel your silence under specific circumstances. The difference here is one of scope and frequency.
What we do know is that nobody has ever prevailed in any such proceeding to the extent that they were permitted to take out an ad in the New York Times reading “SUCK IT, NSA! WE BEAT YOUR JOKE-ASS GAG ORDER IN SECRET COURT!”
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Noncompliance is hardly “mere”, consent to be governed is practically the whole game. In any case, it isn’t very bushido to be intimidated by threats, since that would allow pretty much anyone to compel one to do anything. And if what people would compel you to do is unethical, then your compliance implicates you, personally.
Actually, anybody can in fact do so, regardless of whether or not they even received an actual “security letter” or gag order in the first place. Leading by example can be to publicize how frivolous these measures are, and encourage people to act against them, rather than bide their time in fear.
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From the TOS:
Any claim or dispute between you and Happy Mutants arising out of or relating to these Terms, in whole or in part, shall be governed by the laws of the State of California, without respect to its conflict of laws provisions. We agree and you agree to submit to the personal jurisdiction of a state court located in San Francisco, California or the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.
My VPN provider issues them daily - I honestly don’t know why an online presence wouldn’t be doing that, if they’ve bothered to set one up in the first place.
How useful they may be is up for debate, but a popular VPN provider’s refusal to provide one, along with their being based in the USA led me to pass them up when looking around for a VPN.
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The somewhat surprising thing is that Reddit would get a hahaha-‘constitution’-double-secret-warrant, rather than just the usual requests for information on certain users(which they apparently get moderately frequently).
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The right to challenge the gag order in court was established by the 2nd Circuit in 2008. The cases are sealed, but some documents are made public. We don’t know who the plaintiffs are, but we know a lot about how this is making its way through the courts – see here: Page Not Found
The EFF apparently has three clients, including “a telephone company.” The cases were consolidated, then remanded to district court because of USA Freedom Act changes to the law. Essentially it is dragging out. But, eventually there will be a big Court of Appeals ruling on this question of the constitutionality of the gag orders, and then possibly a Supreme Court review.
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Maybe it died before they could even put it up.
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Another way the American security apparatus works to undermine American businesses to preserve our Free, Democratic, Capitalistic way of life.
(Note that “Freedom”, “Democracy”, and “Capitalism” are registered Trademarks and are not intended to represent any actual goods or services rendered by the U.S. Government or its affiliates.)
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The canary be back tomorrow. It is April 1st yah know.
Or, that’s what they’ll say when the judge secretly orders them to put it back.
given what reddit is i would suspect daily… if not multiple requests daily.
You know, it’s funny. When I lived in the Middle East, I was astonished at how quickly and pervasively conspiracy theories proliferated. Then I realized that the reason was that people knew for a fact that the various despotic regimes were hiding things and lying to them. About what? No way to know. So people fill in the blanks. A few years ago, if you had told me that the government was secretly intercepting all voice traffic from the US to other countries, I’d have called you crazy.
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Reddit seems to be more popular than many for problematic people to actually go shooting their mouths off; but pretty much any widely-used online entity is going to have a number of customers who are of interest to the authorities at any given time; I just wonder what happened to get one of the scary orwellian data demands, rather than the usual kind.
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So who’s the provider already? 
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FTFY
This has been officially acknowledged for a long time.
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I suspect simply stating a direct threat against the president would suffice. (Secret Service response and all that.)
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…pining for the fjords?
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