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I think technical people (including myself) tend to view legal systems as dumb machines that can be tricked into executing any possible permutation of their own

I think technical people (including myself) tend to view legal systems as dumb machines that can be tricked into executing any possible permutation of their own rules, and this is how you get "clever" ideas like warrant canaries. Laws are precise, but unlike the rigid systems we work with, ultimately there is going to be human somewhere who can classify events into buckets like "horse shit" and "not horse shit"

jaggi1 9y ago
It is a collision of a centralized top down hierarchical system designed by people with no skin in the game v/s highly decentralized and evolving networked system with lots of people with skin in the game. Former are destined to be sore losers.
Dylan16807 9y ago
Warrant canaries are valuable even if they don't have a legal basis. A canary might not fail, and if it does fail it invites a massive media storm about being forced to directly lie.
- menacingly 9y ago
  If they can compel your silence on the original matter, thus necessitating the warrant canary, why can't they compel your silence on being forced to update the warrant canary? If warrant canaries were ever a real threat, what's to stop them from simply deciding that the only legal direct or indirect answer to "have you ever received a super duper secret subpoena" is "no comment". The issue is not whether or not the concept of secret access to my data is just, it's whether or not you can actually play silly games with the party literally writing the rules to the game you're trying to play.
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    > If they can compel your silence on the original matter, thus necessitating the warrant canary, why can't they compel your silence on being forced to update the warrant canary? For a while, but not forever and in every case. > If warrant canaries were ever a real threat, what's to stop them from simply deciding that the only legal direct or indirect answer to "have you ever received a super duper secret subpoena" is "no comment". I think a lot of people would immediately break that law in protest. It would be interesting, to say the least.
digi_owl 9y ago
Best i can tell, it is not about getting an end verdict. It is about having the site taken down while being investigated. For many, the mere threat for legal wrangling is enough to scuttle them as they can't afford the outage. There have been at least one instance of someone getting their blog domain seized by the FBI because they were using .com, even though what they were hosting were MP3s the artists themselves had asked to be distributed, and neither the server nor the author were US based. RIAA had basically raised a stink and one day the domain was redirected to a FBI warning page.
dane-pgp 9y ago
While you might be right in normal circumstances, once the legal system tries to make humanly-intuitive decisions about the mathematical processes inside real "dumb machines", that legal system really should trigger exceptions or result in undefined behaviour. Already, legal notions like jurisdiction are being pushed to their limits thanks to technology like the internet (look at the extradition case of Kim Dotcom), and things get even murkier with questions of copyright. What is the difference between a forum (such as Reddit) where people can discuss magnet links/hashes (to news articles, and public domain works, and copyrighted works) and a forum called The Pirate Bay? If it's just the word "Pirate" in the title (as opposed to "The irate Bay", for example), then it seems that the law is very sensitive to single byte changes on a website, and the job of humans to classify these things into buckets rapidly becomes intractable. We're back to "What Colour are your bits?" again: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

jaggi1 9y ago

It is a collision of a centralized top down hierarchical system designed by people with no skin in the game v/s highly decentralized and evolving networked system with lots of people with skin in the game. Former are destined to be sore losers.

Dylan16807 9y ago

Warrant canaries are valuable even if they don't have a legal basis. A canary might not fail, and if it does fail it invites a massive media storm about being forced to directly lie.

menacingly 9y ago
If they can compel your silence on the original matter, thus necessitating the warrant canary, why can't they compel your silence on being forced to update the warrant canary? If warrant canaries were ever a real threat, what's to stop them from simply deciding that the only legal direct or indirect answer to "have you ever received a super duper secret subpoena" is "no comment". The issue is not whether or not the concept of secret access to my data is just, it's whether or not you can actually play silly games with the party literally writing the rules to the game you're trying to play.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  > If they can compel your silence on the original matter, thus necessitating the warrant canary, why can't they compel your silence on being forced to update the warrant canary? For a while, but not forever and in every case. > If warrant canaries were ever a real threat, what's to stop them from simply deciding that the only legal direct or indirect answer to "have you ever received a super duper secret subpoena" is "no comment". I think a lot of people would immediately break that law in protest. It would be interesting, to say the least.

digi_owl 9y ago

Best i can tell, it is not about getting an end verdict. It is about having the site taken down while being investigated. For many, the mere threat for legal wrangling is enough to scuttle them as they can't afford the outage. There have been at least one instance of someone getting their blog domain seized by the FBI because they were using .com, even though what they were hosting were MP3s the artists themselves had asked to be distributed, and neither the server nor the author were US based. RIAA had basically raised a stink and one day the domain was redirected to a FBI warning page.

dane-pgp 9y ago

While you might be right in normal circumstances, once the legal system tries to make humanly-intuitive decisions about the mathematical processes inside real "dumb machines", that legal system really should trigger exceptions or result in undefined behaviour. Already, legal notions like jurisdiction are being pushed to their limits thanks to technology like the internet (look at the extradition case of Kim Dotcom), and things get even murkier with questions of copyright. What is the difference between a forum (such as Reddit) where people can discuss magnet links/hashes (to news articles, and public domain works, and copyrighted works) and a forum called The Pirate Bay? If it's just the word "Pirate" in the title (as opposed to "The irate Bay", for example), then it seems that the law is very sensitive to single byte changes on a website, and the job of humans to classify these things into buckets rapidly becomes intractable. We're back to "What Colour are your bits?" again: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23