[tomlongson]

For those who aren't familiar, a NSL Canary is like a Warrant Canary, but for National Security Letters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

Australia just outlawed warrant canaries. Scary times.

[avz]

> Australia just outlawed warrant canaries. Scary times.

Assuming you accept the need for the non-disclosure requirements in some court orders and administrative subpoenas, wouldn't the decision to allow canaries be a legal mistake in the first place? (Albeit AFAIK one also made by the US Department of Justice)

The argument for the legality of canaries would have to rely on the distinction between the affirmative and negative disclosure. But it is very easy to imagine a service that scrapes sites with canaries and publishes an affirmative list of those which took theirs down recently (or in a given time interval). This completely subverts the argument.

Is it perhaps yet another case where the legal minds failed to account for the current (actually... two decades old) state of technology? Am I missing something?

[jessaustin]

But it is very easy to imagine a service that scrapes sites with canaries and publishes an affirmative list of those which took theirs down recently (or in a given time interval).

https://canarywatch.org/

[Houshalter]

Practically there's no difference, the consequences of a canary or blowing the whistle is the same. But the interesting thing is canaries require the government to order someone to lie, whereas the other just compels them to not tell the truth.

[icebraining]

I don't see how such a service would invalidate the argument; you could prevent that service from affirming it, but that shouldn't impact the original canary issuer.

And I don't think canaries are really a feature of current technology; seems like one could have simply posted a weekly newspaper ad with the same content.

[mirimir]

There's a better approach that depends on third-party scraping. You publish the canary on a schedule, but take it down as soon as it's been scraped. So there's nothing to take down when you get the warrant, NSL, etc.

Edit: And then you don't publish the canary as scheduled. Before you got the warrant, NSL or whatever, you were subject to no court order. So you were free to speak. After getting it, can you be compelled to speak falsely?

[schoen]

> Assuming you accept the need for the non-disclosure requirements in some court orders and administrative subpoenas

You could distinguish between temporarily keeping particular orders a secret, permanently keeping them a secret, and permanently keeping secret even summary information about the number, kind, and scope of the orders (or what kind of matters they related to).

[ori_b]

To be fair, I've always thought that warrant canaries were extremely questionable legally. If the government can legally say "You're not allowed to spill the beans about this", then using a warrant canary is directly subverting that order.

As a result, I always assumed that anyone that had a warrant canary in place would get a court order to keep it up regardless.

I would be shocked if they stood up in court, and I don't find the outlawing of it any more disturbing than allowing secret warrants in the first place. (Although secret warrants are pretty damn disturbing.)

[koenigdavidmj]

Theoretically an order compelling speech, especially false speech, scares courts more than prohibiting speech in certain circumstances, which happens frequently.

[lerpa]

I may be wrong but in the Australian case it seems journalists are forbidden from creating a canary in the first place, they cannot say they did or did not receive a gag order. That's what I got from what I've read but not sure.

If the issue was being forced to continue with the canary then there is a solution for that just use as a canary, before you received any order: We have received a gag order!

And when you do receive a gag order what are they going to do? Make you remove that? Keeping it seems as a direct violation of that order.

[mirimir]

Sure, they can force you to keep the old one up.

But can they force you to put up a new one?

[darklajid]

I like the section from Moxie in that article. Did anyone check if this is lawful to begin with? I mean, if you can't tell that you were asked for private data, can you 'tell' by now saying that you weren't asked for private data?

Just to be safe: Any NSL is crap. Braindead. I'm not trying to support that BS. This is among the worst possible ideas a government can come up with and belongs in the realm of (referring to recent posts) Turkey at the moment.

But IF they exist for some reason, is a canary really working? Isn't this just another 'The government cannot crack my password' argument, missing the lead pipe way..?

[snowpanda]

If you follow the source there's a section stating that according to EFF having a warrant canary should not be a problem:

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/whispersystems.org/issues/...

What EFF wrote says more to me than Moxie saying 'every lawyer I've spoken to'. Which lawyers? In what context? What was said?

[shalmanese]

This seems like one of those better to ask for forgiveness than permission kind of things. What NSLs thrive on the most is lack of attention. Anything that brings more high profile is something the NSA would prefer to avoid, lest case law gets more clarified around them.

[vacri]

> Australia just outlawed warrant canaries. Scary times.

Outlawing warrant canaries per se is not scary at all. They're a method of communicating information that has been deemed to be forbidden, so it's just a way of preventing the rules-lawyering method of still conveying that info. The overreach of such things in the first place is the scary part, not the stuff around canaries themselves.

The focus should be on getting rid of the overreach of these things, not on preserving a loophole.

[SilasX]

Agree 100%: "You mean I can't circumvent the plain meaning of a court order through information-theoretic trickery? Truly, fascism is upon us."

[tomlongson]

How deep is the rabbit hole?

[tomlongson]

Reddit should remove the π symbol on their website, as if Pi itself disappeared.

"We can't talk about Pi."

[tomrod]

Or bleem [0]

[0] http://www.strangehorizons.com/2000/20001120/secret_number.s...

[paavokoya]

I remember several mods of r/darknetmarkets posting that they received NSL's forwarded from actual reddit admins.. Not sure if that post is still available though.

[kevinnk]

Are you referring to https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/30tudk/psa_... ? That was a normal subpoena (without a gag order), not a NSL.

[cyphar]

> Australia just outlawed warrant canaries. Scary times.

Australia outlawed warrant canaries for journalism warrants (warrants for journalists when they investigate someone). I'm fairly sure that law doesn't apply to all other kinds of warrants.

[Aelinsaar]

Ridiculous times too, when all of this gathering of data is predicated on a flawed assumption that it won't just be creating more noise in the attempts to predict terrorism. We've switched from one wasteful, illegal, and noisy method (kidnapping and torture) to invading privacy.

I'd love to see efficacy proven, just once.

[linkregister]

Isn't an NSL by definition a non-noisy, targeted method? I'm going off of the widely known methodology for getting data from a U.S. company, FAA 702, popularly known as "PRISM".

Do you have any links describing NSLs being part of a noisy, dragnet operation?