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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?
FWIW, the date on TFA is yesterday.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
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
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
Beltane is May 1.
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.
... these "national security letters" is garbage and is a prime example how far into a totalitarian state america has fallen...
A notification is a notification, regardless of how you dress it up.
This fails the hierarchy. The government cannot (legally yet) compel false speech on the part of a person or corporation.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)