3 ms·
> veteran top litigator who handled the situations that reached the ear of the ACLU I think you assume that getting in contact with lawyers from the ACLU is mu
by Spivak 3y ago
> veteran top litigator who handled the situations that reached the ear of the ACLU
I think you assume that getting in contact with lawyers from the ACLU is much much harder than it is, either that or that the ACLU only gets involved in sufficiently high-profile cases but nonetheless false. If you're a company that deals with sensitive data and have a legitimate worry about getting NSLs you could probably get a meeting with the relevant legal/policy expert just by shooting them a polite email about it.
Experts in a particular niche field not wanting to talk about their passion, impossible challenge. "Wait, woah, you also care about this?! You wanna testify in the committee hearing for the bill our team is working on?"
- neilv 3y agoI agree that getting in contact with the ACLU is easy. (I did it myself, when I was just a random city committee volunteer, and we were considering an issue that I figured the ACLU could help inform.) My question was where would someone go to get counsel about canaries, from someone who knows how this actually works in practice, not only in the legal precedents that are public info. (After all, we are talking about situations involving gags.) For example, I was guessing maybe there's someone at the ACLU who has heard of enough of the non-public to give good counsel. But asking. Unstated, I was also wondering whether the folk wisdom that so many people repeat, and which some seem to rely upon, is informed by the expertise of the rare people in a position to know the full reality. Even if it's true, it does sound like a stereotypical computer person's misunderstanding of how law works: "Aha! But this Constitutional interpretation says that government can't compel speech! Checkmate!" Hence, checking that.