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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.
Sounds like a cool progressive site. Anyone got a link?
The original wording will be back tomorrow.
Happy Beltaine for all the Wickers and Irish people.
It's April 1st and this is slashdot. Fool me once, blah blah blah. i'm just removing the bookmark for this site for the next 24 hours.
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
Reddit is also more restricted than the users might expect. You can, for example, post certain comments about censorship and automated comment removal only to find out that they will never appear to other users and only your user can see them.
Its cute that using a warrant canary makes people think that it gets them out of legal obligations, but it really doesn't.
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?
Try to argue in court against a judge that you didn't tell people about the secret order, go ahead, lets see how that works out for you.
It blows me away that people think something like a warrant canary is clever enough to get around the people enforcing the requirement not to tell anyone.
Do you think the school yard bully gives a shit when you tell him you didn't do anything and didn't make fun of him while all the kids are laughing at hime cause you made fun of him? You guys are really out of touch with reality of you think this 'warrant canary' thing is to be trusted. Honestly, its not naive, its all the way to stupid.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
When we get a President who tells them to stop spying on the American people and prosecute every Saudi state proselytizer for sedition. 2/3 of the threat of terrorism could be stopped by heavily building up the Border Patrol and Coast Guard and ordering the FBI to unleash Hell on every Wahhabi and Salafist preacher in the US. Lock up the preachers for preaching terrorism and jihad. Use asset forfeiture to seize the state funds coming from the royal family.
But then again, we are at war with ISIS despite the fact that our own "allies" are funding it and transferring American weapons to it. I am at times tempted to vote for Trump simply because he's the only guy who's enough of an asshole to gently pull the Saudi king's ear close to him and whisper "I cannot be responsible if the CIA puts a 0.50 round in your head if the funds to ISIS don't dry up."
Whodathunk!
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.
to go back to Usenet?
... these "national security letters" is garbage and is a prime example how far into a totalitarian state america has fallen...
Just start watching each other. Make reports of your co-workers, neighbors, even closest friends. It worked in the Soviet Union, why can't for you?
In 2013, NSLs were found unconstitutional by a Federal Court. In 2015 a Federal Court of Appeals told that court to reconsider its opinion in light of changes to the USA Freedom Act. Anyone know the current status of that case and/or the enforceability state of NSLs at this time?
We're at war with the low profit margins of defense companies. Eternal war and being the world's policeman benefits nobody else but the makers of military equipment and providers of military services.
Or did you think the F-35 was actually supposed to work one day?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
If I wanted to undermine canaries, I would find popular sites and NSL them for NSL's sake. I don't even have to have a real target user. Just use a NSL to kill the canary. Then later (a month from now, a year from now .. whenever the need arises), I can NSL again for whoever I'm really investigating.
Indeed, if I had that power, it would be irresponsible of me to not do it.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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
Those clowns are pathetic. Censoring of subreddits, shadowbanning users because the mods don't agree with what you post. Hell, I got banned from /r/history simply because I disagreed about the cause of a certain war, pointing out several differing opinions. The mods told me in my ban letter than the 'history of that war was settled' and no counter-argument would be allowed.
Fucking Communist douchebags. I quickly went to Voat, which is far more diverse (not just a bunch of failed liberal assclowns there) and far more interesting.
They are truly idiotic for releasing this on April first, if they want people to take them seriously.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Reddit has also been censoring posts lately by removing them from various subreddits without explanation. Typically these are posts which go against it's leftist liberal views. One of the biggest examples was the Cologne sexual assaults, which were continuously removed over a 3-day period until finally being permitted. A more recent example can be seen here: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/4ctuew/found_this_on_rwtf/
This post refers to another post which contained a video showing a black woman assaulting a white man because he has dread locks. This post was immediately removed from /r/videos, /r/politics, and /r/wtf with no reason given several times (posted by several users). The removed post can be still be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/4cswsg/white_guys_cant_have_dreadlocks/
The worst part is you can't even link to the removed post on reddit, as it will automatically be removed as well. It appears this was easily circumvented by using a shortlink, however.
Apparently the FBI and NSA have plenty to hide, if they invoke the adage then they would have the most fingers pointed at them
So the warrant canary on this site is the word slashvertisment: gotcha.
Suppose Reddit set up a whole suite of warrant canary warning pages: ...
"Reddit has not received any NSL requests during January 2016 for people with a last name beginning in A."
"Reddit has not received any NSL requests during January 2016 for people with a last name beginning in B."
"Reddit has not received any NSL requests during January 2016 for people with a last name beginning in C."
"Reddit has not received any NSL requests during December 2016 for people with a last name beginning in X."
"Reddit has not received any NSL requests during December 2016 for people with a last name beginning in Y."
"Reddit has not received any NSL requests during December 2016 for people with a last name beginning in Z."
Then when they get an NSL request they delete one line.
Extending this to more dates and more letters of the name is left as an exercise.