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U.S. judge blocks Twitter's bid to reveal government surveillance requests

400 points by antpls 6y ago

tehwebguy 6y ago
Just do it anyway, pull the curtain back Jack!
acruns 6y ago
Judge blocks Apple's bid to reveal government surveillance using Covid-19 tracing program
gorgoiler 6y ago
I’m not clear on whether the judge ruled in the abstract, or if they know the details of who was being surveilled and why. I just about trust a judge to act as a third party check on power but only if they get total transparency in lieu of the public being able to see.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sneak 6y ago
Can we just ponder for a moment that we are being asked to believe that anything Twitter does or does not do could pose an existential threat to the United States? “National security” is a sham now and has been a sham every other time it has ever been used as a blanket override for human rights. Human rights to free expression are more important than any nation. This is just government spies trying to cover their ass whilst they continue breaking the law. They've conveniently mixed it in with "but terrorism!" to ensure that they get to continue breaking the law.
- cryptica 6y ago
  What's more disturbing and I simply can't get my head around is that Americans feel that they can trust big corporations more than their own government. I don't trust US corporations at all and I thought that there was some kind of corporate conspiracy to discredit the US government to allow corporations to gain more power... Now I'm thinking that the situation in the US is even worse than that; not only are corporations trying to discredit the government, but the government is working hard to discredit itself as well.
  - op03 6y ago
    I dont know what kind of Americans you are running into but thats just not true -> https://www.people-press.org/2019/09/19/why-americans-dont-fully-trust-many-who-hold-positions-of-power-and-responsibility/ https://www.people-press.org/2019/09/19/why-americans-dont-f...
    - schrodinger 6y ago
      Thanks for sharing, that was a very interesting read!
  - sneak 6y ago
    There aren't many/any instances of single corporations causing >10M deaths, or oppressing millions of people. There are lots of recorded occasions of single governments doing this. Governments are seen as having authorities that corporations do not, and thus are to be viewed much more skeptically as a general policy. Companies can't raid your house with machine guns, or toss you in jail for publishing an integer on your website. It's not that corporations are trusted more; it's that the maximum possible damage by corporate evil is much, much, much, much less than the maximum possible damage by government evil. IBM participated in the holocaust, but they didn't directly cause it. That needed governmental authority. It's prudent to maintain several orders of magnitude higher suspicion and/or skepticism of government activities; corporations are basically sandboxed (e.g. no armies, for the most part) in this model.
    - iKevinShah 6y ago
      > There aren't many/any instances of single corporations causing >10M deaths, or oppressing millions of people. Sure. But that doesn't mean they dont have a say / influence in it. Take any social network for example, with a small change in their respective feed / discovery algorithm , it could clearly influence it. > the maximum possible damage by corporate evil is much, much, much, much less than the maximum possible damage by government evil In my opinion, it definitely is NOT that less. Sure governments can cause wars and all that but the corporations right now have a lot more control over the mind / general public view of things than the government.
- parsimo2010 6y ago
  Hypothetically, a terrorist group could use private DMs on Twitter to coordinate an attack. If the US captured a low-level terrorist that didn’t know all the details of a plan but knew that the remaining details had been sent to other Twitter users, it would be a legitimate national security request if the government asked Twitter for copies of a user’s private DMs. The hypothetical situation above would be an invasion of someone’s privacy, and any smart terrorist group should be using a message service that is end-to-end encrypted (I’m not sure if Twitter DMs are), but let’s acknowledge that there is at least a plausible national security reason for the US government to request things from Twitter. These requests can be abused, but any social network that has a private messaging feature could be used to coordinate national security threats. Edit for clarification: If the US government made one request to stop a terrorist plot that they had some specific knowledge of, that would be okay in my eyes. If the US government requested access to every Twitter user’s DMs to scan for possible threats, that’s not okay. It seems like Twitter is trying to disclose the number of requests so we can see for ourselves.
  - sneak 6y ago
    I cannot envision any terrorist attack that poses an existential threat to the United States. Fighting terrorism is not a national security matter. Even the largest terrorist attack in the history of the world (not counting the atomic bombings of Japan, which were terroristic by definition but generally excluded from that classification as being carried out during a declared war by a with-a-return-address nation) was at least an order of magnitude off from posing a threat to the national security of the US. "National security" is one of those thought-ending phrases that's thrown about to make people stop thinking critically about the matter. Terrorism is extremely bad, but it's not an existential risk, by its very definition. > let’s acknowledge that there is at least a plausible national security reason for the US government to request things from Twitter There is already a system that permits the government, investigating crimes, to compel information disclosure from a provider. It's called a search warrant, and requires a (very cursory, heh) review by a judge. The government is asking not only for the power to skip that step (they've already taken that - that ship has sailed), but to prevent people from disclosing just how many times that's happened. "National security" is not an umbrella term that means "bad things happening to USians", although I'm sure that the people using it in this instance as a cover story for widespread, illegal, extrajudicial espionage activity by the government would prefer that you think of it that way. Remember: every legitimate NSL could have been a warrant. There's already a legal framework for how to investigate and prevent crimes, including mass murder. Additionally, anyone who's ever read a US federal warrant for anything involving sequences of bytes or information technology of any kind knows that the burden is already hilariously bad/low, and that they're very close to being rubber-stamp already. I personally have never seen a federal warrant (they're written under penalty of perjury) that didn't have naked factual errors in it, and I've only seen the ones that got approved/signed by a judge. There's a 100%, easily falsifiable, perjury rate in them in my experience. AFAIK none of the federal agents who have signed these sworn statements have ever faced any negative repercussions whatsoever for the falsehoods contained therein. So, that hilariously low/token bar to a search warrant is what they're skipping in these cases. NSLs and related FISA warrants are extremely suspect. It makes sense that they would want to hide and obfuscate their use and existence. They're basically carte blanche for the government to inspect any communications they want - no justification required. The only reason they'd use them in place of a search warrant is because they are illegitimate. This is absolutely not about terrorism, or threats. There's already a functioning-for-them (albeit broken in the legal checks-and-balances sense) system for that in the form of search and seizure warrants; they're trying to confuse you with the terrorism card. This is a cover-up for an illegal power grab, nothing more.
- nabla9 6y ago
  Let's clarify Twitter request first: Twitter requested permission to reveal exact number of requests. Companies are allowed to reveal gagged legal process in ranges of 1000, starting at 0, for six-month periods. Combined FISC and NSL requests can be revealed in ranges of 250. This just shows that Twitter is fighting all the way, as I mentioned in my other comment.
  - SidenKniffsBids 6y ago
    Jack Dorsey recently said something about launching a decentralized social media system, this is probably the reason. Unfortunately a site gets really big like twitter you just have to bow to the powers that be, or they'll make life hard for you.
    - u801e 6y ago
      I wonder, if at this point, Twitter should consider updating their policy to state that government officials are no longer allowed to use their platform and close their accounts.
      - riffic 6y ago
        Twitter has no interest in doing that. I would recommend people start asking their lawmakers for better rules around putting government messaging on public infrastructure rather than use of accounts on third-party commercial services. We live in an age where open web standards can create software that looks and feels a lot like the existing closed/commercial platforms (ActivityPub/Mastodon et cetera).
- senderista 6y ago
  The fact that Twitter refuses to enforce its TOS when the POTUS issues a call to armed insurrection against state governors is an existential threat to the United Ststes.
  - riffic 6y ago
    call your congress critters and tell them that they need to legislate the executive branch spinning up their own activitypub-compliant social implementations on government-funded infrastructure rather than continuing to relay messages through third-party commercial services.
- dahart 6y ago
  What we’re being asked to believe is that the government doesn’t want you to see their backdoor search queries on Twitter’s database. That I do believe, regardless of whether there’s probable cause to think national threats among Twitter users exist. And hey, maybe it’s true... exposing government surveillance overreach probably is considered a threat by the people doing the surveillance, right? OTOH, there probably are at least a few investigations into real cases of abusive or criminal activity. This may be getting used to watch what’s happening in other countries. There are a lot of possibilities for gray area questions that are neither clearly legal nor clearly illegal, and Uncle Sam knows that exposure could cause things to lean toward clearly illegal. Let’s not pretend that privacy of Twitter messages is a human right, though. It’s a for-profit business that was already monitoring your traffic, and the government is asking for what Twitter already has access to. While the government may have a very different agenda, using Twitter doesn’t come with any privacy guarantees in the first place. Twitter’s not going to come arrest you, but they were never under a legal obligation to help protect you from the government or anyone else, and Twitter DMs are not private in a legal sense.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Is the vague concept of national security that you raise the legal foundation for the actions the government is taking? (of course the answer is no, it is not) Sliding into Twitter DMs and baiting fools to say they are going to use fake explosives aren't particularly productive things for the government to be doing, but there's probably a reasonable legal foundation for most of it.
- appleshore 6y ago
  Yet an FBI agent can literally encourage the first ISIS attack in the US and it’s covered on 60 Minutes but no one bats an eye. We’re left just to assume this is the only time it’s happened. While the 3rd terrorist arrested months later assumed the FBI agent died in the attack — which is how involved he was.
  - tehwebguy 6y ago
    What are you referring to
    - aspenmayer 6y ago
      Anderson Cooper: After the trial, you discovered that the government knew a lot more about the Garland attack than they had let on? Dan Maynard: That's right. Yeah. After the trial we found out that they had had an undercover agent who had been texting with Simpson, less than three weeks before the attack, to him "Tear up Texas." Which to me was an encouragement to Simpson. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terrorism-in-garland-texas-what-the-fbi-knew-before-the-2015-attack-2/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terrorism-in-garland-texas-what... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Culwell_Center_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Culwell_Center_attack
      - appleshore 6y ago
        Perhaps this could be justified but at least tip off the fellow agents and law enforcement there that there's two men with machine guns approaching. Instead, the FBI agent watched them exit their vehicle, then he fled the scene, was pulled over and almost shot due to how he was dressed. They put a mask over his head and he disappeared. Luckily no one died.
- tzs 6y ago
  > Can we just ponder for a moment that we are being asked to believe that anything Twitter does or does not do could pose an existential threat to the United States? Are we? The article just mentioned grave or imminent harm to national security, not an existential threat.
  - sneak 6y ago
    What is national security other than the continued existence of a nation? Any other sub-existential attacks can accurately be classified as "crime", which is a police matter, for which we already have a legal framework. They have to inflate it into something big and scary otherwise people would say "hey, wait a minute, that's not constitutional..." Don't get it twisted: it's just a cover for domestic criminals inside the US government who have become accustomed to getting to break the law as much as they want for the last two decades. By making it seem special or important (it's not) they get support in suspending basic human rights such as publishing.
    - frank2 6y ago
      For the past 7 years Ukraine has suffered from poor national security even though there has been very little risk of its ceasing to exist as an independent nation. Ditto Syria even though even if Assad's government had fallen, Syria would've almost certainly continued to exist as a nation.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        Syria still exists as a nation, and if a significant amount of people in the US decided to stop being in the US for a good reason (say, the US becomes a murderous dictatorship), then they should have the right, same as any other citizen of any other country.
      - craftinator 6y ago
        You've failed to define national security, other than to describe the Ukraine as having a bad one.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  we are being asked to believe that anything Twitter does or does not do could pose an existential threat to the United States? Well, they can’t have it both ways. Twitter takes credit for the Arab Spring which was indeed an existential threat to several countries, at least their regimes, but still millions of ordinary citizens were impacted.
- DeathArrow 6y ago
  >They've conveniently mixed it in with "but terrorism!" Alternatively they justify some actions with the war on drugs or fighting against pedophiles with: "think of the children". If you promote strong encryption you might help drug dealers, pedophiles and terrorists. There's also the preaching: "you shouldn't be worried of us spying if you have nothing to hide".
  - T-hawk 6y ago
    We need a name for this fallacy: "We are empowered to stop terrorism." (or drugs, CP, etc) "X can be used for terrorism." "Therefore we are empowered to stop X." Thus that agency gains power over all possible X. Like cash, any monetary transaction, photography, encryption, any messaging system whatsoever, or any number of other things that should make up the bedrock of a free society.
    - fsflover 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
- markus_zhang 6y ago
  If you regard the United States as a bunch of interest groups sitting on piles of raw, human and human-processed resources...
- badrabbit 6y ago
  They can always pseudonymize and redact so that specifics are not revealed. They have a point about a security risk but what they also sneak under that guise is their desire to hide intelligence capabilities and potential threats. It is not a risk if you don't have a specific threat or plan of attack,certainly not a risk to the nation. Vulnerabilty is not risk. Revealing a request may thwart their investigation but the burden of proof that a specific threat that cannot be stopped if the information is public is required of them. Short of that, you can chit chat on the subway with a third cousin of a terrorist or something and they can say "if we can't monitor his DMs then we can't know if they are using code words to plan a terrorist attack" On a different note, I think it is a failure if the US constitution to not clarify details like this. A constitutional convention to review and update the bill of rights and a few other things is long over due.
- m10i 6y ago
  > Human rights to free expression are more important than any nation. Well put.
- colordrops 6y ago
  It's amazing how many times the Patriot Act has been renewed beyond expiration.
scarface74 6y ago
Obligatory: And this is a branch of the same government that HN users want to “regulate tech”. Why would anyone want to give government more power?
- pluc 6y ago
  Because normally a government does smart thing for its people. It hasn't done that in some time in the US.
  - Mary-Jane 6y ago
    Since when? Governments have a history of greed, corruption, and trampling on the rights of it's people for it's own gain. Ref: any history book on any country, ever
    - cercatrova 6y ago
      The problem is all large organizations strive for power. One can be more easily changed than the other, at least in democratic republics. Corporations are more like autocracies, their leadership can't be changed. One can say that corporations derive power from customers, but this is not necessarily so. As they grow larger, they can necessarily control user habits through psychological means. The government can too but it has a lesser incentive, as power is more distributed, again in a democratic republic. Money however is a much better fitness function than power, as it can be quantified, so it is unsurprising that corporations gain power.
      - searchableguy 6y ago
        The only difference is that someone proposed an ideal when talking about government, but not for companies. Why not use the ideal free market here as well?
        cercatrova 6y ago
        Free markets are sustained by governments free of bribery and corruption. Otherwise you get monopolies and oligopolies as in the Gilded Age and arguably now.
nabla9 6y ago
We learn from Snowden leaks that Twitter was the only major platform that refused to participate voluntarily with PRISM surveillance. Twitter only complied with legitimate FISA requests they were not able to refuse. Microsoft,Yahoo, Google, AOL, Skype and Apple all did more than legally required.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  No wonder they wanted to replace Dorsey
  - jsjddbbwj 6y ago
    Dorsey is a terrible, part time CEO.
    - kaesar14 6y ago
      Only CEO in Silicon Valley with any sense of decency and a spine
- gonzo41 6y ago
  Everyone else you mentioned runs a non trivial business that interacts with the government significantly. I know trump get's a lot of action on twitter but the next guy won't be using it for the main means of comms. It's great that twitter took a stand, but if that company failed everyone would easily replace it. Twitter is toy.
  - notmarkus 6y ago
    What does that have to do with anything?
    - gonzo41 6y ago
      It's understandable because of Corporate law in the US that a public business wouldn't stand too firm against government overreach because it may impact future business, apple can do it because apple isn't a desktop provider to the government and doesn't have a market in danger in that space.
hf8665 6y ago
Does anyone know why judges are so deferential to the US security apparatus? It seems in general like they have a clear bias toward "taking the security system at its word", even when common sense would dictate otherwise in any particular case. It's sincerely puzzling to me why national security entities seem to get treated so differently and I wonder if there's some legal precedent or consideration I'm not aware of. Like in this case, I fail to understand how releasing the number of requests would have any security bearing.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  When the government pays your salary and controls your workload and picks whether you get promoted...
- lawlessquestion 6y ago
  Judges are nominated by the president, and approved by the senate. If the people that nominate the judges are controlled hook line and sinker by the security apparatus, there's no reason to believe judges would operate any differently. They know where there bread is buttered
- pinkfoot 6y ago
  > Does anyone know why judges are so deferential to the US security apparatus? Kompromat?
- lokar 6y ago
  If what you mean is why do most of the judges tend to rule the same way in this area, it's due to precedent, they don't really have a choice. The balance (or lack of one) you note was mostly established by higher courts years ago.
- bladegash 6y ago
  No judge wants to be responsible for a future terrorist attack or degrading intelligence capabilities against other foreign adversaries, regardless of whether the threats are real, perceived, and/or imagined. In this case, releasing the numbers might shine light into their capacity for investigations. In other words, sometimes security/capability gains more from perception than reality.
rkagerer 6y ago
I hope they appeal.
m_a_g 6y ago
I wish there is a Twitter employee like Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning to leak those surveillance requests. Leaking documents seems to be the only way forward in the U.S.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Would you leak it if you worked at twitter? Just curious
  - m_a_g 6y ago
    I sincerely would leak depending on its severity. Sometimes you need to do the right thing regardless of the consequences.
- adjkant 6y ago
  Chelsea Manning, not Bradley
  - analbumcover 6y ago
    Wasn't it Bradley at the time of the leaks?
    - TheNorthman 6y ago
      How is that relevant? Don't dead name people and in general don't be a dick.
      - analbumcover 6y ago
        The variable labeled 'Bradley' wasn't relabeled to 'Chelsea' until well after the leak. Changing a name doesn't propagate backwards in time. Although you're certainly free to conform to whatever meaningless social convention you like. I assume it provides you a sense of belonging, moral righteousness, etc.. But, given the conformity you seem to demand, you might want to consider who here is most deserving of the "dick" moniker.
choward 6y ago
Could Twitter set up a warrant canary for every user? Append "/canary" to URLs and make it 404 if the data has been compromised.
- detaro 6y ago
  I'd be very surprised if the courts would follow the extremely narrow definition of "speech" required for this to work. Is there any legal precedent otherwise?
- sk0g 6y ago
  Or better yet, code 451!
- 1f60c 6y ago
  But couldn't they force Twitter to keep updating the canary as part of the gag order?
  - taywrobel 6y ago
    You can’t force someone _to_ say something. You can only require they not say specific things. That’s the process by which the canary works. You set up a default state by which you say “this data has not been compromised”. Nobody can legally force you to say that in the event it has been compromised. At least not yet, and if we get there, I really do fear for us.
  - pinkfoot 6y ago
    Yes, you are not allowed to take any action to circumvent the gag order. Changing the status of the canary included. [From memory from some ancient HN thread]
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      The workaround is to make the canary automatically lapse frequently unless renewed. Precedent in the past regarding library books provides that you can't be compelled to do something by a gag order that qualifies as speech, and updating a canary daily with a statement like "As of {current_date} we know of no warrants that have been issued for {private_content}" probably qualifies. Have a static page, update the date value daily so long as it's true, stop updating it when it becomes false. Based on the library book precedent I think this would hold up.
ninetyfurr 6y ago
>Twitter has argued it free speech rights are violated That's rich coming from a company famous for censorship.
egberts 6y ago
What happened to their canary file?
bradleyjg 6y ago
Six years for summary judgment?!? Even if Twitter had won, it and the American public still would have lost through this endless delay. Something needs to be done about the glacial pace of federal litigation. Justice delayed is justice denied.
known 6y ago
"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it" --Einstein
Zenst 6y ago
I can accept many reasons for not revealing at the time, jeopardising a criminal investigation and that could cover national security investigations. So I can see how the judge has angled this. What I can not understand or appreciate is that such requests can not be made public after said investigations are closed. Alas that approach is now also curtailed and would have to be raised as a separate avenue now. Which with this judgement, will now make that a little more harder to pursue. Been nice if the Judge had allowed that avenue of release, but that was not catered for in the scope of how this case was put forward. Maybe if Twitter had approached with - what is a fair and reasonable amount of time until we can make such requests public? Or along those lines, then that avenue of release would of been within the judgment remit. Though I'm no lawyer, and may well that this approach they have taken is the best as it allows two bites of the cherry and an angle to appeal. One just hopes the matter is not as clear cut and settled as it stands.
- nabla9 6y ago
  Twitter requested permission to reveal exact number of requests. Companies are allowed to reveal gagged legal process in ranges of 1000, starting at 0, for six-month periods. Combined FISC and NSL requests can be revealed in ranges of 250.
microcolonel 6y ago
Seems like they definitely have every right to reveal these; I don't see how there is a constitutional basis for this unless they can demonstrate that Twitter would be enabling some imminent vital threat.
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
A few thoughts: 1) There is no such thing as privacy anymore, at least with respect to anything electronic. I know this because I wanted to be the head of a large online community (I worked on a program which I hoped would become the next Facebook), and I studied everything I could about security/privacy that I could for many years. 2) It would be better, far better, if, when users signed up on Twitter (or any other online service for that matter) if there was a big screen which comes up, with big letters, and says "Everything you say could potentially be taken out of context, could potentially be used against you in Court, and/or could potentially be spun on the News Media or by other people in such a way so as to destroy your reputation, livelihood, and potentially your life." This would be honest, ethical, up-front. "Forewarned is forearmed", as they say... 3) When Jack Dorsey filed his articles of incorporation, for his company (which Venture Capitalists require, and for good reason, if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to sue if/when the founder skips town on them!), but when he did this, he made a legally binding CONTRACT with the Government. Oh sure, it may have been a State government, but let's remember the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution (the Constitution is also a CONTRACT, incidentally...). But once you do this, even though you might not be liable financially on a personal level for your company, you have basically set yourself up to be REGULATED, REGULATED, REGULATED, by the Government and its in-no-shortage-of-supply Lawyers... (Regulated is another fun word for "they're going to tell you what to do" <g>). (Now, I'm not saying that's a bad thing... historically that regulation created some major wins for society, case in point, the meat packing industry, many many years ago, when proper sanitary conditions were not followed, and there are many other examples of this). But the thing is, this Judge is making his decision based on that CONTRACT (the contract is the tip of the iceberg, by the way, it basically makes the company accept ALL of the thousands of miles of statutory U.S. code, it's sort a lead-in to that). So, based on what I know about U.S. Law -- the Judge is probably, probably not wrong, but remember, he's making his decision based on a) The CONTRACT, aka "Articles Of Incorporation". b) The miles and miles of State, Federal, Statutory Code and Agency Code (since federal agencies are quasi-law creating entities) that the said CONTRACT (a), forces the company to accept... In other words: c) Lawyers, not technologists, are running the show... <g> And you wondered how "The Swamp" works... <g> Hey, I think I remember some song lyrics (Depeche Mode, actually!): "The handshake seals the contract from the contract There's no turning back [...] The holiday was fun packed The contract still intact..." -Depeche Mode, Grabbing Hands
backtoyoujim 6y ago
Twitter requires phone numbers. I wonder if the millions of US Americans whose stimulus checks got "lost" are somehow correlated to people that have criticized Trump on twitter.
- nichos 6y ago
  That's some next level paranoia.
ck2 6y ago
Isn't everything on twitter public in the first place? It's the least of any worries. Just a reminder all kinds of "government" for any reason is reading all of your email any time they want without a warrant and it's perfectly legal. Just has to be 180 days old but I suspect that doesn't make a difference. The law allowing it is 30 years old and why the Clintons had their own private email server in their basement in the first place. Congress was going to close the loophole but Jeff Sessions and Trump stopped it.
- Keverw 6y ago
  Yeah, I heard that to about emails, after so many days they consider it abandoned property. But seems some different courts debate over that... Written back in the old days when everyone used POP for mail... Emails would download to your computer and be deleted from the server. Plus webmail back then had limited storage anyways, like 20MB while now you can get at least a gig or more depending on the provider. So the server was more just like a temporary holding space for your email, before it got downloaded to your computer where you'd store it longer term and be responsible to back it up, etc yourself. Now with webmail and IMAP (where your same email account can be on both your phone and laptop). Super outdated now since we access email differently now with multiple modern devices, I doubt many people use POP email now.
silverreads 6y ago
Maybe if we stopped voting with single issues in mind we could see that we have been funding terrorists with every new congressional budget bill for a long ass time, and the real way to stop terrorism is to defund our government sponsored terrorists who we know commit crimes every day, instead of worrying about terrorists we don't know about yet but need to find because our local terrorists tell us we need to. Just saying.
rsync 6y ago
It's April now so that means this: https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt ... is now 14 years old. This was the first warrant canary[1] and, I am sad to say, one of the few remaining ones. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary#Usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary#Usage
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
aagha 6y ago
Didn't Reddit have some sort of a "red herring" that was raised if they had to comply with some FISA request?

400 points by antpls 6y ago

tehwebguy 6y ago

Just do it anyway, pull the curtain back Jack!

acruns 6y ago

Judge blocks Apple's bid to reveal government surveillance using Covid-19 tracing program

gorgoiler 6y ago

I’m not clear on whether the judge ruled in the abstract, or if they know the details of who was being surveilled and why. I just about trust a judge to act as a third party check on power but only if they get total transparency in lieu of the public being able to see.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sneak 6y ago

Can we just ponder for a moment that we are being asked to believe that anything Twitter does or does not do could pose an existential threat to the United States? “National security” is a sham now and has been a sham every other time it has ever been used as a blanket override for human rights. Human rights to free expression are more important than any nation. This is just government spies trying to cover their ass whilst they continue breaking the law. They've conveniently mixed it in with "but terrorism!" to ensure that they get to continue breaking the law.

cryptica 6y ago
What's more disturbing and I simply can't get my head around is that Americans feel that they can trust big corporations more than their own government. I don't trust US corporations at all and I thought that there was some kind of corporate conspiracy to discredit the US government to allow corporations to gain more power... Now I'm thinking that the situation in the US is even worse than that; not only are corporations trying to discredit the government, but the government is working hard to discredit itself as well.
- op03 6y ago
  I dont know what kind of Americans you are running into but thats just not true -> https://www.people-press.org/2019/09/19/why-americans-dont-fully-trust-many-who-hold-positions-of-power-and-responsibility/ https://www.people-press.org/2019/09/19/why-americans-dont-f...
  - schrodinger 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing, that was a very interesting read!
- sneak 6y ago
  There aren't many/any instances of single corporations causing >10M deaths, or oppressing millions of people. There are lots of recorded occasions of single governments doing this. Governments are seen as having authorities that corporations do not, and thus are to be viewed much more skeptically as a general policy. Companies can't raid your house with machine guns, or toss you in jail for publishing an integer on your website. It's not that corporations are trusted more; it's that the maximum possible damage by corporate evil is much, much, much, much less than the maximum possible damage by government evil. IBM participated in the holocaust, but they didn't directly cause it. That needed governmental authority. It's prudent to maintain several orders of magnitude higher suspicion and/or skepticism of government activities; corporations are basically sandboxed (e.g. no armies, for the most part) in this model.
  - iKevinShah 6y ago
    > There aren't many/any instances of single corporations causing >10M deaths, or oppressing millions of people. Sure. But that doesn't mean they dont have a say / influence in it. Take any social network for example, with a small change in their respective feed / discovery algorithm , it could clearly influence it. > the maximum possible damage by corporate evil is much, much, much, much less than the maximum possible damage by government evil In my opinion, it definitely is NOT that less. Sure governments can cause wars and all that but the corporations right now have a lot more control over the mind / general public view of things than the government.
parsimo2010 6y ago
Hypothetically, a terrorist group could use private DMs on Twitter to coordinate an attack. If the US captured a low-level terrorist that didn’t know all the details of a plan but knew that the remaining details had been sent to other Twitter users, it would be a legitimate national security request if the government asked Twitter for copies of a user’s private DMs. The hypothetical situation above would be an invasion of someone’s privacy, and any smart terrorist group should be using a message service that is end-to-end encrypted (I’m not sure if Twitter DMs are), but let’s acknowledge that there is at least a plausible national security reason for the US government to request things from Twitter. These requests can be abused, but any social network that has a private messaging feature could be used to coordinate national security threats. Edit for clarification: If the US government made one request to stop a terrorist plot that they had some specific knowledge of, that would be okay in my eyes. If the US government requested access to every Twitter user’s DMs to scan for possible threats, that’s not okay. It seems like Twitter is trying to disclose the number of requests so we can see for ourselves.
- sneak 6y ago
  I cannot envision any terrorist attack that poses an existential threat to the United States. Fighting terrorism is not a national security matter. Even the largest terrorist attack in the history of the world (not counting the atomic bombings of Japan, which were terroristic by definition but generally excluded from that classification as being carried out during a declared war by a with-a-return-address nation) was at least an order of magnitude off from posing a threat to the national security of the US. "National security" is one of those thought-ending phrases that's thrown about to make people stop thinking critically about the matter. Terrorism is extremely bad, but it's not an existential risk, by its very definition. > let’s acknowledge that there is at least a plausible national security reason for the US government to request things from Twitter There is already a system that permits the government, investigating crimes, to compel information disclosure from a provider. It's called a search warrant, and requires a (very cursory, heh) review by a judge. The government is asking not only for the power to skip that step (they've already taken that - that ship has sailed), but to prevent people from disclosing just how many times that's happened. "National security" is not an umbrella term that means "bad things happening to USians", although I'm sure that the people using it in this instance as a cover story for widespread, illegal, extrajudicial espionage activity by the government would prefer that you think of it that way. Remember: every legitimate NSL could have been a warrant. There's already a legal framework for how to investigate and prevent crimes, including mass murder. Additionally, anyone who's ever read a US federal warrant for anything involving sequences of bytes or information technology of any kind knows that the burden is already hilariously bad/low, and that they're very close to being rubber-stamp already. I personally have never seen a federal warrant (they're written under penalty of perjury) that didn't have naked factual errors in it, and I've only seen the ones that got approved/signed by a judge. There's a 100%, easily falsifiable, perjury rate in them in my experience. AFAIK none of the federal agents who have signed these sworn statements have ever faced any negative repercussions whatsoever for the falsehoods contained therein. So, that hilariously low/token bar to a search warrant is what they're skipping in these cases. NSLs and related FISA warrants are extremely suspect. It makes sense that they would want to hide and obfuscate their use and existence. They're basically carte blanche for the government to inspect any communications they want - no justification required. The only reason they'd use them in place of a search warrant is because they are illegitimate. This is absolutely not about terrorism, or threats. There's already a functioning-for-them (albeit broken in the legal checks-and-balances sense) system for that in the form of search and seizure warrants; they're trying to confuse you with the terrorism card. This is a cover-up for an illegal power grab, nothing more.
nabla9 6y ago
Let's clarify Twitter request first: Twitter requested permission to reveal exact number of requests. Companies are allowed to reveal gagged legal process in ranges of 1000, starting at 0, for six-month periods. Combined FISC and NSL requests can be revealed in ranges of 250. This just shows that Twitter is fighting all the way, as I mentioned in my other comment.
- SidenKniffsBids 6y ago
  Jack Dorsey recently said something about launching a decentralized social media system, this is probably the reason. Unfortunately a site gets really big like twitter you just have to bow to the powers that be, or they'll make life hard for you.
  - u801e 6y ago
    I wonder, if at this point, Twitter should consider updating their policy to state that government officials are no longer allowed to use their platform and close their accounts.
    - riffic 6y ago
      Twitter has no interest in doing that. I would recommend people start asking their lawmakers for better rules around putting government messaging on public infrastructure rather than use of accounts on third-party commercial services. We live in an age where open web standards can create software that looks and feels a lot like the existing closed/commercial platforms (ActivityPub/Mastodon et cetera).
senderista 6y ago
The fact that Twitter refuses to enforce its TOS when the POTUS issues a call to armed insurrection against state governors is an existential threat to the United Ststes.
- riffic 6y ago
  call your congress critters and tell them that they need to legislate the executive branch spinning up their own activitypub-compliant social implementations on government-funded infrastructure rather than continuing to relay messages through third-party commercial services.
dahart 6y ago
What we’re being asked to believe is that the government doesn’t want you to see their backdoor search queries on Twitter’s database. That I do believe, regardless of whether there’s probable cause to think national threats among Twitter users exist. And hey, maybe it’s true... exposing government surveillance overreach probably is considered a threat by the people doing the surveillance, right? OTOH, there probably are at least a few investigations into real cases of abusive or criminal activity. This may be getting used to watch what’s happening in other countries. There are a lot of possibilities for gray area questions that are neither clearly legal nor clearly illegal, and Uncle Sam knows that exposure could cause things to lean toward clearly illegal. Let’s not pretend that privacy of Twitter messages is a human right, though. It’s a for-profit business that was already monitoring your traffic, and the government is asking for what Twitter already has access to. While the government may have a very different agenda, using Twitter doesn’t come with any privacy guarantees in the first place. Twitter’s not going to come arrest you, but they were never under a legal obligation to help protect you from the government or anyone else, and Twitter DMs are not private in a legal sense.
maxerickson 6y ago
Is the vague concept of national security that you raise the legal foundation for the actions the government is taking? (of course the answer is no, it is not) Sliding into Twitter DMs and baiting fools to say they are going to use fake explosives aren't particularly productive things for the government to be doing, but there's probably a reasonable legal foundation for most of it.
appleshore 6y ago
Yet an FBI agent can literally encourage the first ISIS attack in the US and it’s covered on 60 Minutes but no one bats an eye. We’re left just to assume this is the only time it’s happened. While the 3rd terrorist arrested months later assumed the FBI agent died in the attack — which is how involved he was.
- tehwebguy 6y ago
  What are you referring to
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    Anderson Cooper: After the trial, you discovered that the government knew a lot more about the Garland attack than they had let on? Dan Maynard: That's right. Yeah. After the trial we found out that they had had an undercover agent who had been texting with Simpson, less than three weeks before the attack, to him "Tear up Texas." Which to me was an encouragement to Simpson. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terrorism-in-garland-texas-what-the-fbi-knew-before-the-2015-attack-2/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terrorism-in-garland-texas-what... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Culwell_Center_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Culwell_Center_attack
    - appleshore 6y ago
      Perhaps this could be justified but at least tip off the fellow agents and law enforcement there that there's two men with machine guns approaching. Instead, the FBI agent watched them exit their vehicle, then he fled the scene, was pulled over and almost shot due to how he was dressed. They put a mask over his head and he disappeared. Luckily no one died.
tzs 6y ago
> Can we just ponder for a moment that we are being asked to believe that anything Twitter does or does not do could pose an existential threat to the United States? Are we? The article just mentioned grave or imminent harm to national security, not an existential threat.
- sneak 6y ago
  What is national security other than the continued existence of a nation? Any other sub-existential attacks can accurately be classified as "crime", which is a police matter, for which we already have a legal framework. They have to inflate it into something big and scary otherwise people would say "hey, wait a minute, that's not constitutional..." Don't get it twisted: it's just a cover for domestic criminals inside the US government who have become accustomed to getting to break the law as much as they want for the last two decades. By making it seem special or important (it's not) they get support in suspending basic human rights such as publishing.
  - frank2 6y ago
    For the past 7 years Ukraine has suffered from poor national security even though there has been very little risk of its ceasing to exist as an independent nation. Ditto Syria even though even if Assad's government had fallen, Syria would've almost certainly continued to exist as a nation.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      Syria still exists as a nation, and if a significant amount of people in the US decided to stop being in the US for a good reason (say, the US becomes a murderous dictatorship), then they should have the right, same as any other citizen of any other country.
    - craftinator 6y ago
      You've failed to define national security, other than to describe the Ukraine as having a bad one.
goatinaboat 6y ago
we are being asked to believe that anything Twitter does or does not do could pose an existential threat to the United States? Well, they can’t have it both ways. Twitter takes credit for the Arab Spring which was indeed an existential threat to several countries, at least their regimes, but still millions of ordinary citizens were impacted.
DeathArrow 6y ago
>They've conveniently mixed it in with "but terrorism!" Alternatively they justify some actions with the war on drugs or fighting against pedophiles with: "think of the children". If you promote strong encryption you might help drug dealers, pedophiles and terrorists. There's also the preaching: "you shouldn't be worried of us spying if you have nothing to hide".
- T-hawk 6y ago
  We need a name for this fallacy: "We are empowered to stop terrorism." (or drugs, CP, etc) "X can be used for terrorism." "Therefore we are empowered to stop X." Thus that agency gains power over all possible X. Like cash, any monetary transaction, photography, encryption, any messaging system whatsoever, or any number of other things that should make up the bedrock of a free society.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
markus_zhang 6y ago
If you regard the United States as a bunch of interest groups sitting on piles of raw, human and human-processed resources...
badrabbit 6y ago
They can always pseudonymize and redact so that specifics are not revealed. They have a point about a security risk but what they also sneak under that guise is their desire to hide intelligence capabilities and potential threats. It is not a risk if you don't have a specific threat or plan of attack,certainly not a risk to the nation. Vulnerabilty is not risk. Revealing a request may thwart their investigation but the burden of proof that a specific threat that cannot be stopped if the information is public is required of them. Short of that, you can chit chat on the subway with a third cousin of a terrorist or something and they can say "if we can't monitor his DMs then we can't know if they are using code words to plan a terrorist attack" On a different note, I think it is a failure if the US constitution to not clarify details like this. A constitutional convention to review and update the bill of rights and a few other things is long over due.
m10i 6y ago
> Human rights to free expression are more important than any nation. Well put.
colordrops 6y ago
It's amazing how many times the Patriot Act has been renewed beyond expiration.

scarface74 6y ago

Obligatory: And this is a branch of the same government that HN users want to “regulate tech”. Why would anyone want to give government more power?

pluc 6y ago
Because normally a government does smart thing for its people. It hasn't done that in some time in the US.
- Mary-Jane 6y ago
  Since when? Governments have a history of greed, corruption, and trampling on the rights of it's people for it's own gain. Ref: any history book on any country, ever
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    The problem is all large organizations strive for power. One can be more easily changed than the other, at least in democratic republics. Corporations are more like autocracies, their leadership can't be changed. One can say that corporations derive power from customers, but this is not necessarily so. As they grow larger, they can necessarily control user habits through psychological means. The government can too but it has a lesser incentive, as power is more distributed, again in a democratic republic. Money however is a much better fitness function than power, as it can be quantified, so it is unsurprising that corporations gain power.
    - searchableguy 6y ago
      The only difference is that someone proposed an ideal when talking about government, but not for companies. Why not use the ideal free market here as well?
      - cercatrova 6y ago
        Free markets are sustained by governments free of bribery and corruption. Otherwise you get monopolies and oligopolies as in the Gilded Age and arguably now.

nabla9 6y ago

We learn from Snowden leaks that Twitter was the only major platform that refused to participate voluntarily with PRISM surveillance. Twitter only complied with legitimate FISA requests they were not able to refuse. Microsoft,Yahoo, Google, AOL, Skype and Apple all did more than legally required.

LatteLazy 6y ago
No wonder they wanted to replace Dorsey
- jsjddbbwj 6y ago
  Dorsey is a terrible, part time CEO.
  - kaesar14 6y ago
    Only CEO in Silicon Valley with any sense of decency and a spine
gonzo41 6y ago
Everyone else you mentioned runs a non trivial business that interacts with the government significantly. I know trump get's a lot of action on twitter but the next guy won't be using it for the main means of comms. It's great that twitter took a stand, but if that company failed everyone would easily replace it. Twitter is toy.
- notmarkus 6y ago
  What does that have to do with anything?
  - gonzo41 6y ago
    It's understandable because of Corporate law in the US that a public business wouldn't stand too firm against government overreach because it may impact future business, apple can do it because apple isn't a desktop provider to the government and doesn't have a market in danger in that space.

hf8665 6y ago

Does anyone know why judges are so deferential to the US security apparatus? It seems in general like they have a clear bias toward "taking the security system at its word", even when common sense would dictate otherwise in any particular case. It's sincerely puzzling to me why national security entities seem to get treated so differently and I wonder if there's some legal precedent or consideration I'm not aware of. Like in this case, I fail to understand how releasing the number of requests would have any security bearing.

LatteLazy 6y ago
When the government pays your salary and controls your workload and picks whether you get promoted...
lawlessquestion 6y ago
Judges are nominated by the president, and approved by the senate. If the people that nominate the judges are controlled hook line and sinker by the security apparatus, there's no reason to believe judges would operate any differently. They know where there bread is buttered
pinkfoot 6y ago
> Does anyone know why judges are so deferential to the US security apparatus? Kompromat?
lokar 6y ago
If what you mean is why do most of the judges tend to rule the same way in this area, it's due to precedent, they don't really have a choice. The balance (or lack of one) you note was mostly established by higher courts years ago.
bladegash 6y ago
No judge wants to be responsible for a future terrorist attack or degrading intelligence capabilities against other foreign adversaries, regardless of whether the threats are real, perceived, and/or imagined. In this case, releasing the numbers might shine light into their capacity for investigations. In other words, sometimes security/capability gains more from perception than reality.

rkagerer 6y ago

I hope they appeal.

m_a_g 6y ago

I wish there is a Twitter employee like Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning to leak those surveillance requests. Leaking documents seems to be the only way forward in the U.S.

searchableguy 6y ago
Would you leak it if you worked at twitter? Just curious
- m_a_g 6y ago
  I sincerely would leak depending on its severity. Sometimes you need to do the right thing regardless of the consequences.
adjkant 6y ago
Chelsea Manning, not Bradley
- analbumcover 6y ago
  Wasn't it Bradley at the time of the leaks?
  - TheNorthman 6y ago
    How is that relevant? Don't dead name people and in general don't be a dick.
    - analbumcover 6y ago
      The variable labeled 'Bradley' wasn't relabeled to 'Chelsea' until well after the leak. Changing a name doesn't propagate backwards in time. Although you're certainly free to conform to whatever meaningless social convention you like. I assume it provides you a sense of belonging, moral righteousness, etc.. But, given the conformity you seem to demand, you might want to consider who here is most deserving of the "dick" moniker.

choward 6y ago

Could Twitter set up a warrant canary for every user? Append "/canary" to URLs and make it 404 if the data has been compromised.

detaro 6y ago
I'd be very surprised if the courts would follow the extremely narrow definition of "speech" required for this to work. Is there any legal precedent otherwise?
sk0g 6y ago
Or better yet, code 451!
1f60c 6y ago
But couldn't they force Twitter to keep updating the canary as part of the gag order?
- taywrobel 6y ago
  You can’t force someone _to_ say something. You can only require they not say specific things. That’s the process by which the canary works. You set up a default state by which you say “this data has not been compromised”. Nobody can legally force you to say that in the event it has been compromised. At least not yet, and if we get there, I really do fear for us.
- pinkfoot 6y ago
  Yes, you are not allowed to take any action to circumvent the gag order. Changing the status of the canary included. [From memory from some ancient HN thread]
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    The workaround is to make the canary automatically lapse frequently unless renewed. Precedent in the past regarding library books provides that you can't be compelled to do something by a gag order that qualifies as speech, and updating a canary daily with a statement like "As of {current_date} we know of no warrants that have been issued for {private_content}" probably qualifies. Have a static page, update the date value daily so long as it's true, stop updating it when it becomes false. Based on the library book precedent I think this would hold up.

ninetyfurr 6y ago

>Twitter has argued it free speech rights are violated That's rich coming from a company famous for censorship.

egberts 6y ago

What happened to their canary file?

bradleyjg 6y ago

Six years for summary judgment?!? Even if Twitter had won, it and the American public still would have lost through this endless delay. Something needs to be done about the glacial pace of federal litigation. Justice delayed is justice denied.

known 6y ago

"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it" --Einstein

Zenst 6y ago

I can accept many reasons for not revealing at the time, jeopardising a criminal investigation and that could cover national security investigations. So I can see how the judge has angled this. What I can not understand or appreciate is that such requests can not be made public after said investigations are closed. Alas that approach is now also curtailed and would have to be raised as a separate avenue now. Which with this judgement, will now make that a little more harder to pursue. Been nice if the Judge had allowed that avenue of release, but that was not catered for in the scope of how this case was put forward. Maybe if Twitter had approached with - what is a fair and reasonable amount of time until we can make such requests public? Or along those lines, then that avenue of release would of been within the judgment remit. Though I'm no lawyer, and may well that this approach they have taken is the best as it allows two bites of the cherry and an angle to appeal. One just hopes the matter is not as clear cut and settled as it stands.

nabla9 6y ago
Twitter requested permission to reveal exact number of requests. Companies are allowed to reveal gagged legal process in ranges of 1000, starting at 0, for six-month periods. Combined FISC and NSL requests can be revealed in ranges of 250.

microcolonel 6y ago

Seems like they definitely have every right to reveal these; I don't see how there is a constitutional basis for this unless they can demonstrate that Twitter would be enabling some imminent vital threat.

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

A few thoughts: 1) There is no such thing as privacy anymore, at least with respect to anything electronic. I know this because I wanted to be the head of a large online community (I worked on a program which I hoped would become the next Facebook), and I studied everything I could about security/privacy that I could for many years. 2) It would be better, far better, if, when users signed up on Twitter (or any other online service for that matter) if there was a big screen which comes up, with big letters, and says "Everything you say could potentially be taken out of context, could potentially be used against you in Court, and/or could potentially be spun on the News Media or by other people in such a way so as to destroy your reputation, livelihood, and potentially your life." This would be honest, ethical, up-front. "Forewarned is forearmed", as they say... 3) When Jack Dorsey filed his articles of incorporation, for his company (which Venture Capitalists require, and for good reason, if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to sue if/when the founder skips town on them!), but when he did this, he made a legally binding CONTRACT with the Government. Oh sure, it may have been a State government, but let's remember the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution (the Constitution is also a CONTRACT, incidentally...). But once you do this, even though you might not be liable financially on a personal level for your company, you have basically set yourself up to be REGULATED, REGULATED, REGULATED, by the Government and its in-no-shortage-of-supply Lawyers... (Regulated is another fun word for "they're going to tell you what to do" <g>). (Now, I'm not saying that's a bad thing... historically that regulation created some major wins for society, case in point, the meat packing industry, many many years ago, when proper sanitary conditions were not followed, and there are many other examples of this). But the thing is, this Judge is making his decision based on that CONTRACT (the contract is the tip of the iceberg, by the way, it basically makes the company accept ALL of the thousands of miles of statutory U.S. code, it's sort a lead-in to that). So, based on what I know about U.S. Law -- the Judge is probably, probably not wrong, but remember, he's making his decision based on a) The CONTRACT, aka "Articles Of Incorporation". b) The miles and miles of State, Federal, Statutory Code and Agency Code (since federal agencies are quasi-law creating entities) that the said CONTRACT (a), forces the company to accept... In other words: c) Lawyers, not technologists, are running the show... <g> And you wondered how "The Swamp" works... <g> Hey, I think I remember some song lyrics (Depeche Mode, actually!): "The handshake seals the contract from the contract There's no turning back [...] The holiday was fun packed The contract still intact..." -Depeche Mode, Grabbing Hands

backtoyoujim 6y ago

Twitter requires phone numbers. I wonder if the millions of US Americans whose stimulus checks got "lost" are somehow correlated to people that have criticized Trump on twitter.

nichos 6y ago
That's some next level paranoia.

ck2 6y ago

Isn't everything on twitter public in the first place? It's the least of any worries. Just a reminder all kinds of "government" for any reason is reading all of your email any time they want without a warrant and it's perfectly legal. Just has to be 180 days old but I suspect that doesn't make a difference. The law allowing it is 30 years old and why the Clintons had their own private email server in their basement in the first place. Congress was going to close the loophole but Jeff Sessions and Trump stopped it.

Keverw 6y ago
Yeah, I heard that to about emails, after so many days they consider it abandoned property. But seems some different courts debate over that... Written back in the old days when everyone used POP for mail... Emails would download to your computer and be deleted from the server. Plus webmail back then had limited storage anyways, like 20MB while now you can get at least a gig or more depending on the provider. So the server was more just like a temporary holding space for your email, before it got downloaded to your computer where you'd store it longer term and be responsible to back it up, etc yourself. Now with webmail and IMAP (where your same email account can be on both your phone and laptop). Super outdated now since we access email differently now with multiple modern devices, I doubt many people use POP email now.

silverreads 6y ago

Maybe if we stopped voting with single issues in mind we could see that we have been funding terrorists with every new congressional budget bill for a long ass time, and the real way to stop terrorism is to defund our government sponsored terrorists who we know commit crimes every day, instead of worrying about terrorists we don't know about yet but need to find because our local terrorists tell us we need to. Just saying.

rsync 6y ago

It's April now so that means this: https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt ... is now 14 years old. This was the first warrant canary[1] and, I am sad to say, one of the few remaining ones. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary#Usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary#Usage

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

aagha 6y ago

Didn't Reddit have some sort of a "red herring" that was raised if they had to comply with some FISA request?