Reddit's Warrant Canary On National Security Letters... Disappears

from the make-of-that-what-you-will dept

As of January 29, 2015, reddit has never received a National Security Letter, an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or any other classified request for user information. If we ever receive such a request, we would seek to let the public know it existed.

Even with the canaries, we're treading a fine line. The whole thing is icky, which is why we joined Twitter in pushing back.

... this case poses a fundamental lingering question: to what extent do companies have a constitutional right to report truthful aggregate data about national security requests? Amici believe that there is no basis in law or policy for the government to prohibit recipients from disclosing the mere fact that they have or have not received a national security request, and from publishing an accurate, meaningful account of that statistic. And while the government has taken the position that it believes “[n]othing prevents a company from reporting that it has received no national security legal process at all,” ..., it remains unclear whether the First Amendment guarantees that disclosure, or whether a company that has received a national security request in the past could report zero for subsequent periods of time.

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Well, here's something to speculate about. On Thursday, Reddit posted its latest transparency report concerning government requests for user information or content removal. This is the second such report, following its 2014 report . As one Reddit user quickly noted , the 2014 transparency report had something of a "warrant canary" concerning National Security Letters (NSLs):If you can't read that, it says:However, no such line is in the latest report. And, of course, that leads to plenty of speculation. Unfortunately, this tends to be the problem with non-standard warrant canaries. Ithave disappeared due to a gag order around a NSL. Or ithave disappeared for other reasons. In fact, there is some argument that just posting such a warrant canary is not allowed under current law (which of course raises all sorts of First Amendment questions).Reddit's CEO Steve Huffman responded in the comments in a manner that doesn't totally clear anything up at all:From there, he links to the amicus brief a bunch of internet companies filed in support of Twitter in its ongoing legal fight over the right to disclose surveillance requests. In that lawsuit, Twitter noted that the US government claimed that some information in its planned transparency report was "classified" and Twitter was not allowed to publish it.In the amicus brief, which Reddit was a part of along with Automattic (Wordpress), CloudFlare, Wikimedia and more, it was pointed out that they're not even sure if it's legal to have that kind of warrant canary:And thus, Reddit is now involved in a case over whether or not the very notion of a warrant canary itself is legal -- and that, alone, may be a reason why it chose not to include it this time around. And thus, we're still left with something of a guessing game. Of course, this is another reason why that lawsuit is so important. The level of transparency that platforms can provide to the public about how much governments (and the US government in particular) are demanding access to information is very, very important.

Filed Under: national security letters, nsls, transparency report, warrant canary

Companies: reddit