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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

So why not publish positive canaries with an explicit expiry date that requires manual republishing? If you set in place a scheme, long before any agency contacts you, whereby you manually publish a statement saying you have not received an NSL, and that statement disappears on its own, how could they prosecute you for failing to publish that statement?

Better yet, make each canary in the form of an original haiku.

  Month 1:

    reddit.com  
    has not to date received  
    an NS letter

  Month 2:

    This, our company
    As of the time this appears
    Has not been silenced

  Month 3:

    Our routine remains
    A haiku for you from us
    On the month's first day

Is the USG going to claim that reddit must, in perpetuity, write a new haiku each month? That seems like a burden designed to be defeated in court.

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I think the argument is that this a scheme clearly setup to flout the law. If those haikus kept going by a business exec until an associate should sell the company's stock, would that be an acceptable way of insider trading?

After some contemplation I must say I agree with you. Using technicalities like "well I didn't ACTIVELY say anything!" to get around the law shouldn't work in any situation - your example makes this very apparent.

At the same time, companies should not be forced to try and circumvent the law with cute tricks. Preventing companies from informing their users/customers that their privacy has been breached by a 3-letter-agency should be illegal.

We shouldn't be arguing about the legality of canaries, we should be arguing about the legality of gag orders. Arguing pro canaries is fighting a losing battle; it's fighting the symptoms instead of the cause.

The difference is in the timing. Prior to receiving an NSL, it's legal for you to say you didn't get one.

In the example of insider trading, it was NEVER legal for you to give inside information. So stopping your Haiku is legal, but the discussion when you agreed "sell your stock when my Haiku ends" was not.

This is, in fact, how rsync.net's canary works: https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

I totally agree!

In fact, when I first heard of warrant canaries, that's how I expected that they would work.

at what point does it stop becoming "not publishing a statement" and becomes "publishing a coded statement"?

"No NSL Letter has been given for data to users with the 1st letter being P" "No NSL Letter has been given for data to users with the 2nd letter G" etc etc. Publishing 200 haikus a month like this would surely go against the gag order (since you could reveal the username like this).

I think at one point common sense comes int play

The law and common sense only partially intersect

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