Why do we have to be pedantic and can't just say when the FBI or CIA come after us?

The essence of a canary is you can't say they did, but you can stop saying they didn't.

Gag orders.

Because these agencies are horrifically corrupt beyond any usefulness. These agencies could go after any number of human and drug traffickers and make these problems nearly vanish almost overnight because they collect practically all of our communications. But they don't do that. They are used as targeted political cudgels when its handy and when there is much money to be made.

In the U.S., national security letters (NSL) typically include a nondisclosure requirement:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter>

A warrant canary asserts that no such obligation has been incurred.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary>

Suuuuper pedantic.

For instance, 2 and 3 narrowly specify just law enforcement agencies, of which the CIA and NSA are not.

Buuuut, since 703 allows law enforcement agencies to harvest data captured by intelligence agencies any statement that doesn't specifically exclude those intelligence agencies is essentially meaningless.

I think we'd consider them "law enforcement agencies." But, for the sake of complete clarity, I'm happy to say that we haven't done any of these for the CiA or NSA or any non-US equivalent.

As we sort of saw with the Twitter Files (and other incidents with foreign governments, eg the Indian government), they can get extremely pedantic about describing the kind of cooperation they have with government agencies.

(Not to point to a conspiracy to silence political opposition, just to highlight that, at least to me, the extent of their cooperation was really surprising relative to how little they talked about it)