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Time For a Warrant Canary Metatag?
An anonymous reader writes "With the advent of national security letters and all the NSA issues of late perhaps the web needs to implement a warrant 'warrant canary' metatag. Something like this: <meta name="canary" content="2013-11-17" />. With this it would be possible to build into browsers or browser extensions a means of alerting users when a company has in fact received such a secret warrant. (Similar to the actions taken by Apple recently.)
The advantage the metatag approach would have its that it would not require the user to search out a report by the company in question but would show the information upon loading of the page. Once the canary metatag was not found or when the date of the canary grows older than a given date a warning could be raised. Several others have proposed similar approaches including Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic and Cory Doctorow's Dead Man's Switch." What problems do you see with this approach?
They would force you to keep the "all-clear" signal with guns pointed at your head? That might be a problem.
The person adding the metatag rotting in a federal prison?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
do not work.
like, what the flying fucktonmeister fuck? why do you think it would be exempt from the "don't tell the victim of surveillance" rules because it's a metatag?
best you can do is close down the service. that is it! and even then you'll have to fight in court!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Never mind the Canary insert. A company's reputation is at risks. Quick! Make a page that copies this and we'll use it to our advantage. My company will not go down in flames because someone writes/posts something bad about us. I wanna be like Amazon! Likes, likes, likes, and a reputation for filter out the bad and inserting only the good. Times a wastin'! Let's get crackin'! (end of sarcasm)
I'm not really sure what problem this solves, or how the outcome would change if the canary "died."
We're well-aware that many companies are required to produce information via FISA court orders, national security letters, or other means. What we don't know-- in many cases-- is how often, what information is obtained, by whom, and for what purpose. The "canary" doesn't answer any of the unknowns, except that a particular company received at least one such order, which is of extremely limited value (if of any at all).
Is was temporarily confused because of the word 'canary' also meaning a 'singing bird' in mobster circles. I assume the miners' version is meant (the one that faints of mine gasses).
What problems do you see with this approach?
Gee, I don't know Timmeh. Maybe the fact that it would break the gag order and you'd be sent to the federal pen?
either through action or inaction are considered illegal by the secret laws ruled by the secret courts. Secret.
Either
1) feds catch you removing the canary (yes not telling them about the canary and the canary removing itself automatically makes you guilty) and you can expect a hefty prison sentence in fed pen. or
2) they realize you are using a canary, and force you (thru warrant, or just plain "you want 20 year of fed pen , punk ?") to still transmit the canary, thus giving a false sense of security to your user.
Either way i doubt of the usefulness of the scheme.
How about we stop trying to sweep shit under the rug, while sitting calmly in our homes and playing Candy Crush on facebook, and start acting like responsible citizens and taking steps to improve the government?
Hit the streets protesting, vote responsibly, gather signatures to force your representatives to take measures.
When you propose or implement things like this, you are sending them the mess it is ok to do it.
morcego
I've heard similar proposals before, and it seems very murky from a legal standpoint. With a highly automated system like this meta tag, I think most judges wouldn't have a problem deciding that you violated the terms of a secret warrant by not updating it. The proposal I heard was to try to circumvent this by making the "canary" something more complicated -- imagine that, every day that you didn't receive a secret warrant, you went to some location in your city, took a photo, and posted it on your webpage. Could a judge then force you to keep doing so? Or even more extreme -- every day that you don't receive a warrant, you run a 10K. Could a judge force you to keep running? Or keep going to work? Or keep self-mutilating in some way? At what point are a person's basic liberties more important than the secrecy of the warrant?
My guess would be that in any of these instances, no judge would rule that you must keep updating the canary. However, I'd imagine that they might rule that you broke the law by setting up the canary in the first place. Of course, there's an obvious problem with that -- as long as you never get a secret warrant, you clearly couldn't be prosecuted for violating one. So it's a weird situation where an action that is otherwise legal, becomes retroactively illegal upon receiving a secret warrant. It's a bit of a mindfuck.
weinersmith
Let companies who really care, keep a tally of individual accounts under scrutiny, total transactional records captured for surveillance purposes: a set of standard metrics for the moment and cumulative by month and year.
Let this information be placed into the Canary meta-tag of every web result for everyone, and let web browsers and plugin developers find ways to display this information on the borders of the page.
People could watch the numbers grow over time easily, and could maintain a constant vigilance and awareness of this problem. What you're accomplishing is the same aim as these companies issuing regular bulletins you must fetch and read.
Its inclusion into the very protocol of the Web and placed on the status areas of browsers by default, would send a clear message that we are not amused.
If the government counters that releasing real-time stats on surveillance orders should be censored for reasons of National Security, let that one fly all the way to the Supreme Court.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
In countries like USA where statistically every 3rd neighbor works for military complex or security forces questioning surveillance methods will land you in jail if lucky or landfill if your are P.I.T.A
Stop resisting changes. The void after official slavery ended has to be filled somehow.
That's how "American Dream(Nightmare)" works, by taking advantage of others.
Of course the NSA will issue a secret cease letter to browser vendors to prevent them from supporting any organically designed feature that bypasses their goal. Information awareness on demand.
What I've never understood:
What if Google decided to say, "fuck it", and not only publicly post when they're asked for data, but details as to which accounts, what data.... everything! We all assume that the feds will scoop someone off to jail, but who'd it be? It's not like the government will take everyone that works at Google, or the stock holders, to jail. Google is huge, with more money than the government, could they not just bail out of jail, and fight it out in court? I mean the whole idea of there being a way that the American government can legally be able to go into private organizations and get their data puts in my mind the feeling that the American government is the head (CEO?) of all companies.
In short, who cares to know the numbers of accounts "searched", I'd only want to know if my account was searched. The rest is nonsense.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Who get to skirt the spirit of the law in favor of the word of the law is the government. A judge would laugh at a company implementing this before throwing the book at them.
Courts are not deterministic machines executing the law and applying the facts of the case as if they were parameters to some sort of code. The Court, a.k.a. the judge, is a nondeterministic human being that is capable of stepping out from the rules and determining that you're trying to blow smoke up it's ass, which The Court does not appreciate.
I'm sure online businesses will be eager to add a tag that says "don't visit my site".
Have you read my blog lately?
They would force you to keep the "all-clear" signal with guns pointed at your head?
There's a way to hack around this by exploiting a Civil War-era constitutional amendment. The company announces in advance, through the canary meta element or another : "If we receive one of several requests, $NAME and $NAME and $NAME will leave the company's employment." I don't see how the government can compel a private employer to compel an employee to continue working for the employer without it being deemed "involuntary servitude" in violation of the employees' Thirteenth Amendment right to quit. So if a certain set of employees is suddenly working for a different company, it's more likely than not that the company has received a classified order to violate a customer's privacy.
My company exists purely in cyberspace. There is nobody in authority who can be contacted in person.
Other than the registrar of your domain and the owner of the IP address block from which your site is hosted. Follow the money to the identity of the person with authority to approve hosting expenses.
Injunction against removing the metatag.
Injunction against telling the individual who updates the metatag to stop updating it.
Injunction against telling the individual who updates the metatag to stop updating it.
The employee who updates the metatag is no longer with the company, and he has a constitutional right to quit.
First, depending on how automated it is, the webmaster might be ordered to keep updating it. So updating the metatag must be a deliberate action and forcing you to update it would be akin to forcing you to lie. Still not clear that they would not do it or try to, though.
Second, in a larger organization the person updating the tag does not need to know whether the data has been compromised or not.
Third, many companies shared data "on a voluntary basis". Whether this is really voluntary or under some thinly veiled threat, there is nothing guaranteeing they won't lie on their own accord.
In conclusion, there is absolutely no way to make "the cloud" safe via tehnical means.
Same reason the British AA (Automobile Association, not alcoholics) were formed and (later) forced to change their ways.
The whole point of the AA was formed to inform members of police speed traps. Back in the days of red-flags in front of vehicles held by a man. If your were an AA member, and there were no police around, an AA employee would be required to salute you.
If, however, there was a police trap present, they would not. Absence of the salute was seen as just such a canary to warn you despite being a "non-action". Eventually it was ruled illegal and the AA and the RAC both become just "vehicle breakdown" companies
When it comes down to it, if a court / police can argue that they need you NOT to trigger the canary (by inaction or otherwise), they will find a way to make you do it. They already redirect your DNS if they steal your domain, what's to stop them updating the canary themselves apart from a minor technical issue? All it will do is just get your whole domain seized to make you compliant.
ESPECIALLY if the entire point of the canary is to indicate to people whether you are subject to a (potentially LEGAL) court order not to reveal that you're under such an order. Little difference between that and you phoning up your buddy to warn him that you were just busted and the cops have his address - it's seen as deliberate evasion of the law. Even if the message is "I **WON'T** text you at 5pm if I've been raided".
The simple fact, though, is that such warrants are not a problem when they are legal and above-board. The problem is when they are not. Skirting the legal grey area yourself is not the correct response to the agencies skirting the legal grey areas.
If all else fails, they'll just institute a law to stop you doing things like this.
With the advent of national security letters and all the NSA issues of late perhaps the web needs to implement a warrant 'warrant canary' metatag
"The web" doesn't implement anything. You do.
The exposure of a warrant in violation of a court order will land you in jail.
The judge won't give a damn about how cleverly you went about it --- until you come up for sentencing, of course.
Folks, even the most free society in the world will have requirements for lawful collection of private digital data. It's a pipedream of utopia to think otherwise. Trying to create canary tags will not help. In the real world, there are criminals, hackers, hostile countries that want to undermine other countries. Not every bogey man is a political phantom--there are real threats in the real world. It's one small piece in the bigger picture of maintaining your national sovereignty. The debate needs to not be about whether or not this type of collection should exist, or how to create some sort of meta tag to undermine it; but rather the scope of it, where to draw the line, and where it fits into the national legal framework.
Canary tags and such wasted efforts by the technical community. Rather, we need to calmly and rationally ask ourselves why every free society in history has decided they needed a wiretaping capability. How do we address those legit concerns with legit privacy concerns? How can technology positively contribute to finding such a balance? The positions and efforts I see the technical community recently taking will simply leave us without a role to address privacy issues that modern societies and governments are trying to solve.
Once you accepted that you can have secret laws to force providers to not tell something, how far is that from forcing them to keep updating that metatag or lying? Before that becomes a standard or something popular enough the law covering that chance will follow.
The system is broken already, there is no possible trust if you have secret laws to force even the most trustfully provider to follow their orders, stop playing boiling frog.
And if you think that things are bad enough already, think that we know so far a few of the 200000 documents leaked by Snowden.
Don't host anything in the USA. Don't use USA-based cloud services. Don't do business with USA companies. At my employer's, the national R & D institute of a smaller European country, we already don't anymore. Business keeps on going as usual. We live as if the USA would not exist. Can we be subject to surveillance, or eavesdropped upon ? Of course. But we are out of the legal hassle. As simple as that.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
"Thereafter, the service sits there, quietly sending a random number to you at your specified interval, which you sign and send back as a "No secret orders yet" message. If you miss an update, it publishes that fact to an RSS feed."
Yeah, *you* sign it. Because the NSA won't have access to your private key, suuuuure....
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Last I checked it is a myth that an undercover cop has to reveal his/her identity if asked. Is there any thinking here that couldn't equally be applied to making drug purchases?
Let's say a drug dealer was caught by the cops selling drugs in which he always assured his clients he wasn't working with the police. Then he made a plea deal to work a sting on his clients. I'm pretty sure the cops would compel him to make the same, now inaccurate, assurance.
would go around telling people that? After some thank yous from the /. community to fear and distrust it would cause would doom the company, and ticking off the feds wouldn't help either...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
First off - Any company/individual that receives ANY warrant should be allowed to publish that fact. I think what's being searched might be reasonably kept secret but the government should never have the right to force you into an anal probe and then demand you keep it secret. That's just dictatorial BS and it needs to stop NOW.
That being said - Let's say you implement the canary... Then the government just makes a small request of the site in a regular time period. Now it becomes an effective whipping tool to stop undesired behavior.
The only way to win is to stop the government playing this game, which in the US it never had (and still doesn't have) the right to.
A company (I've forgotten which, think it was a "pre-cloud" storage solution) used this approach: ... I remember wondering if there is some legal way to force a person/company to stop stopping...
Each day post a photo of the front page from a local newspaper, with the message that if said image was no longer updated, they had received a 'request'. The idea being that the government/law agency/whatever only have the legal means to make them STOP doing something, but are unable to force them to go through the trouble of uploading a new image each day.
think how your ssl does a cert to you but now you include this into the tag and it has a time stamp
if you have an admin that can do testing between sites and users you can then find "anomalies"
these oddities can then be publicized and let society push for "corrections"
Nonsense. It's far too late to play subversive word games, America. Your secret judges will simply judge that any attempt to circumvent the gag order of a secret warrant, through action or inaction, will be illegal, and you will be forced to maintain any such canary. No matter what you try, they will attempt to coerce you to lie, to be complicit in their bullshit whether you want to or not.
I need to make it clear what this means. You are being ordered by your government, to become secret informants to spy on your comrades, and you cannot tell anyone about it or it will be a crime and you will be arrested, maybe even (the fear is) disappear to somewhere like Guantanamo. You are scared of your government. You are being terrorised by them. This isn't the sign of a open, healthy, free society with a strong tradition of democracy. That is the sign of a fascist police state. Right now. It's already too late.
And the rest of the world knows this, especially now. It has come to light. Everyone knows that no-one in your country, no person or corporation, can be trusted to have integrity while this system remains in place, unless you visibly fight for that integrity - stand up to it, absolutely and publicly refuse to cooperate, publish any such attempts - and, yes, be damned for it. The existence of these warrants is critically damaging to your national interests and reputation - far more dangerous than any bomb.
Our integrity sells for so little, but it's all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free. It is small and it is fragile, and it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. People fought for years to keep it. We must never let them take it from us.
Subtle resistance cannot fight this kind of terrorism. You have to stand in front of tanks, not knowing whether they will stop. You have to fight for your freedom, or they will take it away from you, and they will never give it back.
If anyone ever tells you to backdoor your code, Slashdot, would you, as people, have the brass balls (metaphorically or otherwise) to tell them to fuck off? Are your ethics strong enough to refuse, even in the face of legal coercion? Are you at least as badass as LavaBit?
You can come back to the global marketplace when, and only when, the answer is yes. Until then, very sorry, but we can no longer trust you, America, because you and everything you create could be made to lie, cheat and steal, and you'd be powerless to prevent it unless you dare to stand up to it. Don't like it? Dare to say no. And if you don't dare? Then that freedom your ancestors fought so hard for... you threw it away because of terror. Fucking grow a pair.
like, what the flying fucktonmeister fuck? why do you think it would be exempt from the "don't tell the victim of surveillance" rules because it's a metatag?
Because laws are rarely written to cover every variation that could possibly circumvent them.
People regularly take advantage of this until legislation is written to patch the loopholes.
There might be less wiggle room because "national security," but there is undoubtedly room to maneuver.
And as TFA mentioned, the issue of government compelled speech is much thornier than government compelled silence.
I'd love to see the Supreme Court argument on why the government can compel you to continue digitally signing a certificate that says the government is not spying on you (even when they really are).
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I believe it is supposed to work as the canary is present to mean "We have not been served a warrant."
So as soon as they get a warrent they should stop updating that as they can then neither confirm nor deny the event.
However, this relies on the process from getting the warrant to stopping the update to infact happen. What if they get the warrent then the process breaks and they do not clear the message. People still continue to use the site assuming there is no warrant, but one has been served and the process failed. This would make the company liable for claiming "we have not been served a warrant" when they in fact had.
When a simple mistake can lead to large liability don't expect companies to do that. Smaller shops might be able to have confidence in the process. Larger ones are more likely to have the process broken and would have larger liability.
Does this warrant a warrant warrant of a canary in a coal mine?
All the government has to do to make this useless is to regularly send a warrant request to every web property of any note.
What's more interesting is the suit filed by several tech companies demanding permission to provide counts of National Security Letters and the number of accounts affected. Google has already negotiated permission to share this data as long as it's in ranges no smaller than 1000, which actually tells us most of what we want to know already (e.g. in 2012 Google received between 0 and 999 NSLs, affecting between 1000 and 1999 user accounts, which, assuming Google has about a billion users, means the NSLs have affected ~0.0001% of their user base), but exact numbers would be better.
As another poster said, technological solutions to policy problems don't work, at least not well. We need to fix the law.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
For a website about security, have a warrant canary on every user's page when they login. If it disappears, well, there you go. In addition, add a counter that, for every FISA request you get, increments the counter by 2, afterwards which you add 1 to, to get, say "We have not received 255 FISA requests."
What would the United States do if employees of Google, Apple, Microsoft, or another too-big-to-fail tech company whose absence could cripple the economy decided to file into the county jail one by one?
Never, ever put anything in "cyberspace" you don't want the world to know. There is no "security", and any offer of that should logically be regarded as a trap.
Stop wanting dumb things. If you never, ever, put compromising info in the control of someone else then it cannot be handed off under coercion because it doesn't exist to be handed off. This situation is no different than handing off a paper copy of (information) in the pre-internet days and expecting it to be proof against warrant or subpoena.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Others have pointed out that the feds will just arrest you or the web site owner or whoever either under existing law or they'll pass a new one. This is an attempt to find a technical solution to a political problem and that will never work.
some people should grow balls and when enough high powered execs get arrested for violatiing the secret war against Americnas rights warrants by notifing the public that they received one, the power will go back to the people. Leave it long enough and there's no way back once you have no rights. At this rate seems for America "Papers Please Comrade" is just around the corner.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
What if on the main page of your site it says "We have not been served any secret warrants".
Can they force you to leave that on your site?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Interference with an investigation, and so on. Judges are not stupid and can put you in jail forever and a day for the above. So, no, these tricks will not work.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I love the idea of a canary/dead man's switch, just as much as I hate how our constitutional rights (in the USA) have really begun to disappear. But given the NSA's recent behavior, do you really think they are going to let anyone get around gag orders with a technicality? Once they ransack your servers and tell you to STFU or else, they aren't going to let you blow the whistle with a loophole, I'd bet. If they seize your servers and lock you out there would be nothing to stop them from changing the code and making it look like all is well.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Is there any source where an actual legal professional posits that removing a statement does not violate a gag order the same way that publishing one does? Let alone a case where a court decides that?
It just seems like such a stupid and obvious loophole.
So after you load the page, you find out that it was flagged for tracking?
Not exactly a lot of help now, is it?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You're focusing on the wrong problem.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
it would seem, i think, that techology has been the primary solution for any number of political failures, and that the more connected we become, the more desperate and illegal become the attempts to "fix" the leaks politically. we don't close down services, we just move on, improving as we go. as has been said - the internet considers censorship an error, and routes around it. dunno why i'm talking to a f*ckwit though, wasting bandwidth.
No really, stupid idea, waste of time.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Technically I might use RFC6797 as a template except rather than specifying max-age a next-canary parameter communicates frequency at which new canaries are to be expected. next-canary = 0 is invalid and must be ignored. (Once header is sent there are no take-backs) Benefit of this approach comes from leveraging existing browser infrastructure already in place for HSTS.
While nobody can really be sure whether warrant canaries will get you into trouble or whether secret laws allow for you to be compelled to circumvent at least in the US I'm guessing interval at which they are posted and mechanics are somewhat relevant. Say in the case of a canary updated every second into an automated system sure to trigger automatic warnings to users in real-time v. annual new years blog entry post using different words each year to say "we didn't get any NSLs in the past year" whereas in a subsequent year message is subtly "We can't say whether we received any NSLs in the past year".
The larger issue is every time you try to make living with the fruits of a corrupt system (e.g. secret courts spewing secret interpretation of law) more tolerable by treating the symptoms rather than the problem you only contribute to the problem... your energy could likely be put to better use contacting your representatives or otherwise working to build public consensus against government corruption that comes with secret courts and secret interpretation of law.
One must assume that when Apple instituted it Canary that their lawyers thought the process through to some degree. Is Apple and other companies that have implemented such steps subjecting their management to legal peril?
The question is: can it be done with cryptographic means? If you distributed your site to a select audience of subscribers by encrypting it with their public keys, there's a special canary distribution algorithm on top of this architecture that can't be detected by outsiders (outsiders as in: someone who doesn't have access to at least one private key of the subscribers). That algorithm is hardened by switching to a P2P infrastructure where an outsider is one that doesn't at least have N-M (M greater than 0, sometimes even down to 1!) private subscriber keys.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
You insensitive clod! There are quite a lot of things you can only get in the USA:
1 - 900 Trilliion in unpaid loans from other countries. ...need I go on?!
2 - 15,000 gun murders per year in a single city.
3 - The Kardashians, Westboros, etc.
You establish a relationship with a person outside US jurisdiction. If you fail to give that person a specific signal on a regular basis, that person will announce that your company has been compromised by agents of the US government. The signal could be innocuous, such as a friendly daily "how are you doing?" email. If you want to be more covert, make it a two-stage effort (you signal someone who signals someone else who makes the announcement). And absolutely positively do not tell anyone that you have this protocol set up.
There is no such thing as a secret warrant. Agencies cannot issue their own warrant and there is no legal standing for any secret court. Such entities are a direct violation of the Constitution, and are invalid.
By Affirmation of he oath of office, all judges, Law makers, Law Enforcers, and other government officials that have sworn such an oath, are all contractually obligated to Common Law under the U.S. Constitution; Uniform Commercial Code, and Torte law not withstanding.
No citizen is obligated to follow any secret orders, or recognize any secret courts.
If I ever get one, it will be published very loudly.
So you have a heart beat going on that is continually saying "I have been served with a *letter*", when you are told you can not tell anyone you have been served such a letter/request/command from on high --you comply --by stopping the lie. Now everyone knows the truth.
How does one get in trouble by compliance?
What the judge is going to rule you had to continue to lie, after being told not to?
This shit is damage, the net should route around it, the net is an artifact of the people that build their corner of it, so build a graceful failure into it --just good programing.
This idea is easily circumvented by technical, albeit illegal, means... and the organisation you attempting to target has a long history of illegal behaviour.
Just look at Gitmo.
You mean the POW camp that's hosting people captured on foreign battlefields? Is there a single person there of any nationality who was captured on American soil?
No, no, no, you clearly don't understand.
There are no Prisoners of War (POWs) at Gitmo. POWs have rights you know.
No, Gitmo houses a number of illegal combatants which is an entirely different thing. And, as we all know, illegal combatants have no rights at all. Your president at the time said so himself (you know, the one who held his Presidency due to legal technicalities and a large team of lawyers in the first place).
Clearly, creating a legal limbo is the solution to really serious problems in the US... with the possible exception of drowning people in drawn-out legal battles for years, as a last-minute exit strategy. The US authorities don't care much about the outcome anyway - it is the battle itself that matters.
I'm not a fan of Gitmo and would like to see it shuttered sooner rather than later, but let's at least confine our discussions about it to reality. Reality: Nobody has been admitted in Gitmo in years, and none of those who were got sent there after being captured for crimes (real or alleged) on American soil.
Ah, well, yes, that is what they want you to believe ...
Jokes aside, I am sure current US "anti terrorism laws" provide the necessary options to transfer prisoners to Gitmo. After all, the only thing you need to do is classify such a person as an illegal combatant and all civil/human rights vaporize immediately. I am also pretty sure that ordinary citizens would know nothing about such transfers.
And don't even get me started on the secret CIA prisons in foreign countries, and the endless flights they took prisoners on (because hey: "people in transit are not covered by any local laws, so we can screw then and torture them as we see fit, as long as they're on the move").
I agree that the whole "police state" claim is a bit far-fetched, but as a US citizen you seriously have to wonder about the state of your ... well ... state. It seems more resources are spent bending (and in some cases breaking) the law, than actually following it.
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
If the founders had foreseen this kind of abuse of position by the government, we'd have a constitution with specific language prohibiting these secret warrants and the secret courts that issued them.
Then again, FWIW, the Founders went to war over levies much smaller than what we see today.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Today, with the development of world technology, the more people make things meet their needs more real life.
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I use cotse and noticed that they are posting this message on their notification page:
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We have received no requests for any subscriber information this month.
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Yes, but someone who has not received such an order is not subject to its rules, so presumably they can take whatever action or inaction they like until they do. Can someone break a rule they don't know they will be subject to in the future by saying they have not received an order yet up to that point? Once someone receives an order then they comply, but before then...
If you flipped this around, you could lie to your customers by telling them you have received such an order when in fact you hadn't. Most people would interpret this as white noise knowing that no sane person who actually received an order would speak of it. Then when you do receive an order that expressly forbids you from telling anyone about it, you have to stop. This signals that something happened of course, which is forbidden, so the rules tie themselves in a knot.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence