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Reddit Deletes Surveillance 'Warrant Canary' In Transparency Report (reuters.com)
Arthur Dent '99 writes: Today, Reddit deleted wording in its transparency report that would normally indicate that they had not received any "national security letters" or "other classified requests for user information." Such "national security letters" contain penalties for telling others about the request, as the government wishes to keep the request secret. However, because Reddit had placed pre-existing wording in their transparency report in the event of such a letter, they were able to simply delete the existing wording to passively inform others that a request had been received, without actually saying anything at all. This usage of pre-existing wording is known as a "warrant canary" to indicate danger, such as real canaries were used in the past to indicate the presence of deadly gases in coal mines.
If you need to legitimately collect information, consider that behaving like the Stasi probably sends the wrong message.
Folks are growing tired of the if you have nothing to hide ruse.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It is full of whiners. Anyone that's been on Reddit for the past 5 years can see that it went from genuine edgy discussion in all topics to an over-moderated propaganda safe space fest for any of the mainstream subreddits. Reddit was way better than it is. It will go the way of digg eventually.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Only thing I've seen so far is that the scores and user IDs are appearing in binary. Better than the flood of stupid april fools stories, in my opinion.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Reddit isn't the only place that's an "over-moderated propaganda safe space". All of the major and minor discussion sites with public moderation systems are like that now. Hacker News, Stack Overflow, and even Slashdot to some extent exhibit this problem. That's because the problem isn't with the sites, it's with the thin-skinned hipsters and Millennials who abuse the moderation systems on those sites. As more hipster and Millennial types have started using these sites, the moderation abuse has ramped up, resulting in what we're faced with now. The type of moderation system doesn't even matter. If there's some way of censoring other users, then hipsters and Millennials will find a way to severely abuse it to suppress any and all discussion they disagree with.
Yes, I'm sure that Reddit and other users like Apple have terrible lawyers, and we should all take the advice of a semi-anonymous stranger on Slashdot.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Until there's a legal challenge to a warrant canary it does mean something. It's not a matter of deleting something but of failing to publish. That's an important difference. The government can't yet compel a person or company to actively tell a lie. The legal foundation (IMO unconstitutional but that's a whole new rant) for these gag orders does not include language that could allow the government to compel such a thing.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
This is true right up until you start defining "being respectful" as "agreeing with the groupthink". And if you're pretending that's not the definition of respect on the new Reddit I'll call you a liar.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Yep. The worst thing you can do about someone complaining about the direction the site is going is suggest to them that they type another URL. You'll get nothing but push back from 20 somethings olds that have been on Reddit since it launched. They lose their shit about how they're being 'censored' despite every other website still working.
I'm sitting here watching Good Morning America & The Today Show and they're getting live Twitter feedback. You can't have wild card unsafe spaces view-able to the mainstream. "Twitter is censoring me!", "Stop using it", "BUT I CAN'T NOT USE TWITTER MAKE THEM STOP CENSORING ME".
When Slashdot went down the tubes I found Reddit. Now that Slashdot is under new ownership and they seem to care about the 'core base' I'm back. I never got over the Fark redesign and new moderation. (They also tried to pander to the same crowd, getting rid of Foobies on the main page). There are thousands of forums, websites, IRC channels, etc out there. If you disagree with one there's no reason not to move on.
to go back to Usenet?
Legality? You wanna talk "legality"? Here's "legality" for you...
National Security Letters (NSLs), are issued only by the FBI (not by a judge in any court), and ARE NOT LEGAL as such, further, in FACT, they are UNCONSTITUTIONAL violating both the fourth and the first. "Legally" you can post them to any public billboard, REFUSE to do anything they say, and generally WIPE YOUR ASS with them and hand them back to the FBI for fun.
Unfortunately, you are all SHEEP and do whatever people tell you to do.
Instead of, you know, bothering to learn a little about the law of the land and about your rights.
And then fighting stupid shit like NSLs.
Quit giving your rights away.
Dumbfucks.
... these "national security letters" is garbage and is a prime example how far into a totalitarian state america has fallen...
When you pre-emotively tell people 'if we delete this, it means we got something we can't tell you about', when you delete it ... its effectively telling them right, we all know thats what it means, right?
That doesn't mean that a lawyer can't argue it. You can say, "Sure, you're not technically telling them outright, but you're telling them..." but sometimes law is all about those little technicalities.
Exactly how is the message posted? In what context? Like maybe if you put the word "safe" on your websites front page and say, "I'm going to change this to unsafe if we get a warrant!" and then you change it to "unsafe", then maybe that's not legal because it's on your front page, it's clearly serving no other purpose than being a canary, and you're making an addition by adding "un-" to the word. However, what if it just disappears instead of being changed to "unsafe"? What if you don't explicitly tell people that it's a canary? What if it's not directly on the front page, but it's part of a monthly privacy report that you generate, and every month you say, "We haven't received warrants from the government," and then one month you just leave that part out?
Do these changes make a difference? I don't know, but law is all about these kinds of technicalities, and sometimes a very small change puts you on the other side of the law.
They could add a new one "Reddit has not received any reequests from these government agencies since MONTH DD, YYYY: CIA, NSA, TSA (etc). We are not allowed to comment on whether or not we have received any such requests from the FBI however we can tell you we have not received any requests for information from them between Month, DD, YYYY and now."
Or they should just say fuck it, exercise freedom of the press as it is an inalienable right reinforced by the first amendment and announce that there was an inquiry received, because we do not live under an oppressive regime.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50