[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."

[TillE]

There is no "court order". That's the whole point of a warrant canary. A fact is asserted when there is absolutely nothing preventing you from asserting that fact.

Do you want to restrict everyone's speech just in case, or force them to lie? Those are the choices.

[SilasX]

The warrant comes with an order prohibiting you from communicating its presence. That prohibits any means, no matter how cleverly informed by information theory, from communicating that information.

It only forces them to lie if they deliberately take means to force themselves into a lie. "I have not received any warrants that I'm legally allowed to discuss with you."

[Houshalter]

It doesn't need to "trickery". It could be as simple as someone asking if you've received any warrants, and just not answering.

The government shouldn't have the ability to compel people to lie, that's the issue. As far as I know they don't have that ability, and there is nothing illegal about this.

[vacri]

They can compel people to lie already with the NSL - it just depends on how the question is phrased. "Removing a warrant canary" is no different to staging a question from someone that is "Say 'no comment' if you've received an NSL". In both cases, the absence of a response has been set up to convey the forbidden information.

[marssaxman]

It's not illegal to answer "no" if asked whether you have received a national security letter, and neither is it illegal to answer "no comment" if asked whether you have received a national security letter. Nor, further, is it illegal to respond with silence.

Having once given a legal, true answer to the question "have you received a national security letter", a person can later give a different legal, true answer to the same question, or can later choose to respond with silence.

Otherwise, you are asserting that the feds may do more than merely forbid the recipient of an NSL from talking about it, and actually have the authority to force the recipient of an NSL to lie about it.

I sure hope that isn't true. If it is, I'm not sure any of this matters, because we're all fucked already. I cannot conceive of any legitimate justification for allowing any government to have such a power.

[Dylan16807]

Forcing people to lie is bad.

[tomlongson]

How deep is the rabbit hole?