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A comment on Twitter discloses national security letters. Parent comment

Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by wfunction on Friday January 27, 2017 @08:04PM (#13504142)
> An approach that would care about customers and show some more guts would be simple refusal. In essence, civil disobedience in the face of someone who is violating the law. Let the government take them to court, and let it be disclosed in that way.

Is that how it works? You can refuse anything the government tells you to do until they take you to court and the court orders you?

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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by moxious on Friday January 27, 2017 @08:09PM (#13504165)
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Either way, you make it messy for them and you do probably defeat their primary objective, which is secrecy.

How do you think they'd respond? With SEAL Team 6 while keeping everything quiet?

When the government shows up to force you to turn over the information, no violence is required, but you can make sure the newspapers are there when it happens, and that the knowledge of it happening is not restricted to a few execs, keeping key technical people in the dark (as happened at Yahoo)

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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by wfunction on Friday January 27, 2017 @08:20PM (#13504207)
> How do you think they'd respond? With SEAL Team 6 while keeping everything quiet?

Possibly by taking you to court and convicting you of breaking some law by refusing to provide the information the first time, perhaps even completely independently of whether or not the order was actually constitutional. I can imagine lots of bad outcomes that would land you in jail without giving you the chance to take the actual issue to court.

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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by therein on Friday January 27, 2017 @10:57PM (#13504801)
But when dealing with a corporate entity, who do you go after? Since this sort of coercion seems to only work on an individual level, going after the entire corporate entity won't invoke the same emotional response.
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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by brians on Saturday January 28, 2017 @01:00AM (#13505165)
NSLs are addressed to, and claim to compel, an individual.
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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by wfunction on Friday January 27, 2017 @11:02PM (#13504825)
I don't know how the law works. But my completely-unfounded guess is that whoever is supposed to authorize this and who is refusing would be the one convicted.
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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by mirimir on Friday January 27, 2017 @11:39PM (#13504938)
So maybe they ought to be anonymous: http://www.cryptohippie.net/AnonAdmin.html
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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by brokenmachine on Saturday January 28, 2017 @04:58AM (#13505655)
You're giving system administrator status to an anonymous person on the internet. What could possibly go wrong?
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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by mirimir on Saturday January 28, 2017 @09:59PM (#13511621)
You give them limited access and rights, to do what you want them to do. Here, they would have access to communications with government agencies, ability to tweet users or groups thereof, and perhaps responsibility for canary management.
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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by mirimir on Friday January 27, 2017 @11:34PM (#13504926)
They have secret courts for that.
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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by dannypgh on Friday January 27, 2017 @08:18PM (#13504201)
There may be additional penalities/costs for letting it get to the point where a court is involved, but yeah, seems like this falls under "due process of law."
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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by wfunction on Friday January 27, 2017 @08:26PM (#13504229)
Well that's what I mean, it's not like you can just wait for the court to serve you the order. If the additional penalty is that you'll end up in jail or something, then this isn't really realistic is it?
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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by jdormit on Friday January 27, 2017 @08:09PM (#13504164)
Yes. That's what courts are for.
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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by wfunction on Friday January 27, 2017 @08:18PM (#13504199)
But are there no laws that require you to abide by these kinds of orders and challenge them differently? Couldn't you be later convicted of not abiding by those laws independently of whether the orders were themselves legal/constitutional?
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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by paulddraper on Friday January 27, 2017 @09:41PM (#13504534)
An unconstitutional act is void.
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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by rhizome on Friday January 27, 2017 @10:01PM (#13504623)
If you're talking about NSLs, they've been found constitutional for almost a year now. Still time to buy that first birthday gift!

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/in-a-reversal-ju...

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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by paulddraper on Saturday January 28, 2017 @12:04AM (#13505015)
Sure, I'm just saying that there aren't legal repercussions from violating an unconditional act.
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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by techbio on Saturday January 28, 2017 @05:23AM (#13505705)
Illegal repercussions then?
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Re:Twitter discloses national security letters by paulddraper on Saturday January 28, 2017 @09:12AM (#13506337)
Um, sure. If no one watches the watchers.
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