The government believes it is entitled to limit NSL recipients to disclosing how many thousands of NSLs they've received. If you had a canary for 0-99, 100-199

The government believes it is entitled to limit NSL recipients to disclosing how many thousands of NSLs they've received. If you had a canary for 0-99, 100-199, etc, and then removed the canary that didn't match, a court might decide that your decision not to assert that you didn't receive 0-99 canaries was as good as asserting that you did receive 0-99. Whereas, if you have a general canary, you can say you removed it because you just didn't want to use a canary any more. Having said that, I suspect that a court that's sympathetic to the government might well decide that choosing not to speak is itself an act of speech, and that even if you can't be forced to restore a warrant canary, you can be prosecuted for removing it.