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by sulam 1053 days ago
Warrant canaries are largely believed to be unworkable. Ie federal lawyers are going to say "cute, but no, you cannot disclose that we warranted you in this or any other way."
6 comments

Compelled speech of any kind has been repeatedly ruled unconstitutional. Also many companies have triggered their canaries, including Apple, Silent Circle, and Reddit. If Apple's legal department considers it valid I'm inclined to agree with them absent positive evidence of the contrary.
Is there a precedent for compelling speech, even with something like an NSL?
Compelled speech has lots of examples from warning labels, disclosures, truth in advertising, etc.

What you should be asking is their precedent for compelled false speech, which is a much more interesting and difficult to answer.

Not just that, but compelled false advertising—false advertising itself already being a federal crime.
Many of those seem to be "you cannot do this legally codified activity unless you also fulfill the requirements enumerated therein". Can't sell food in retail setting without labeling it as required in the law that regulates food sales, and so on. That seems separate from compelling a creation of a false statement unrelated to business activity.
Why is the commentary of far-right reactionary, who is not a legal expert, commenting on a canadian law, that has nothing to do with warrants, with a citation pointing out that legal experts disagree with him, at all relevant to this conversation?
This forum requires a basic assumption of good faith for posters, especially when it comes to such a trivial mistake like having the wrong anchor section on a link to a short article. It was probably an artifact of their browser trying to be “helpful” when they were copying the link to the full article. Your aggression is unwarranted.
No aggression I can see, remember the good faith assumption!
What aggression? Nothing they said was aggressive.
Probably the giant “United States” section with dozens of examples?
But they linked a specific section, and it wasn't the United States section.
I do not think that the United States section of that article is valid. It seems to equate speech with communication.

It does not feel right to call an IRS tax return "speech".

US law uses 'speech' that way.

'Expression' would arguably be a better word for it, but the term of art is what it is.

Speech in this context means an expression of ideas, wether literal speech, or a newspaper article, or...
Perhaps, but until there's a test case we're all just guessing. So far the Supreme Court has been fairly strict in following the compelled speech doctrine.

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/encyclopedia/case/30/co...

Yes and no.

They can say "don't do anything". They can't say "don't avoid doing something." That's the point if the age of the warrant canary notification--they stopped updating it. This is in effect a dead canary, they're saying they are subject to an order they can't disclose.

What's more likely, they removed it to signal they think canaries are a legal uncertainty or because of something else?
If they don't think warrant canaries are legally doable, wouldn't they have put out a statement saying that?
Untested except obliquely but it is a compelling idea given the tests of the first that we've seen so far.