Lying about it opens you up to potential litigation and being exposed through discovery. It makes less sense to outwardly lie to paying customers rather than simply lie by omission.

I can just imagine EFF drooling over such a prospect.

The EFF wants a world where this kind of BS, and consequent litigation, is a thing of the past. If there's water running down their face, it's tears, not drool. We deserve a better world.

You get there by either getting congress to pass laws or by setting legal precedent in the court. That’s the goal of the legal arm. Not to fight every bullshit civil liberties case, but to fight the last one that doesn’t get thrown out in court.

If you don’t think they look forward to those cases, I think you’re the one who has read them wrong, not me.

this is what "warrant canaries" are for. dont use anyone who doesnt have one

There should probably be case law before anyone actually believes in warrant canaries.

'If it's illegal to advertise that you've received a court order of some kind, it's illegal to intentionally and knowingly take any action that has the effect of advertising the receipt of that order. A judge can't force you to do anything, but every lawyer I've spoken to has indicated that having a "canary" you remove or choose not to update would likely have the same legal consequences as simply posting something that explicitly says you've received something. If any lawyers have a different legal interpretation, I'd love to hear it.' --Moxie Marlinspike

What happens when someone asks you whether you have received a court order of some kind? Are you compelled by court to lie about it?

Why would someone have to lie? They can just say "We can't comment on that" without providing an answer. And then customers can go "sounds pretty suspicious, time to switch VPN services".

That’s kinda my point. A canary removes all the middle ground between a yes and no. Which means no comment = yes.

The parent comment implies that in such a case “no comment” is not compliant with the law, as it informs the inquirer.

Hence the only way to comply is to answer “no”, which is a lie.

Except "no comment" is not a yes. It's a "whether we do or don't, you are not part of that process and not privy to that information either way".

The point of the canary, is to turn any non-answer into a practical, or at least a tentative, "yes". If you no longer see an explicit "no", it means "yes".

So the point of the canary is to turn a proper response into something that's flat out wrong? That seems incredibly counter-productive.

Wrong? What do you mean?

The difference between a canary and a "no comment" is that "no comment" is an extremely common thing to say whether an allegation is true or not so it's not very suspicious, while stopping a canary is very suspicious.

So it's like the scenario you outlined earlier, but more effective.

No, it isn't. It's pretending that "no comment" means something it doesn't. Just because you want it to mean "yes" doesn't mean it means that. It means "we are not going to comment on this, because we have a sane legal department and we're not going to give you any information one way or another".

If you think "no comment" means either yes or no, you're pretending to know something you don't, and you should absolutely stop and go "wait, why am I lying to myself? And why am I believing my own lie?"

Huh?

You're the one that said no comment was suspicious! I said something weaker than that, that it's not very suspicious.

I'm not the one that said a canary failing is a yes. I said it was significantly more suspicious than a no comment.

Yes, I was the one saying that _people_ consider it suspicious, but I'm also the one saying that as a company your only course of action is to not comment on legal matters unless legally compelled to. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. People (in aggregate) don't act rationally, so even if it's going to lose you some customers, no comment.

I won't argue with you there, sure.

But that doesn't explain your previous comment. Was the accusation about [[pretending that "no comment" means something it doesn't]] a misunderstanding of what I was saying? If not, what was it?

"We must comply with legal subpoenas in the jurisdiction in which we operate,"

I'd hire a lawyer that knows how to deal with them and knows how to say no comment.

I've always felt that the warrant canary is a nerd's gotcha designed to get out of a sketchy legal process (NSLs) and that judges would be very unsympathetic. But IANAL.

At least from my perspective, it is not just a "gotcha" problem or whatever feelings it conjures up in a judge's mind.

When a company, who already has a canary in place, receives this kind of warrants, what _can_ the company practically do to comply with non-disclosure? It seems that lying is now the only option left, if the company must explicitly post a "no, we didn't receive such a warrant".

Literal security theatre.

> This is what "warrant canaries" are for. dont use anyone who doesnt have one

What if they have one like this quarterly canary at privacy-forward "write.as" last updated 9 months ago?

    It should be noted with significance if this message 
    fails to be updated on a quarterly basis.
    
    2023-01-05 21:06:06 UTC
    
    No warrants have ever been served to Write.as, or 
    Write.as principals or employees.

https://write.as/privacy --> https://write.as/canary.txt

That means they're either asleep at the wheel or have already been served a warrant.