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".