Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

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>That's a great way to end up in prison

easy there, cowboy, this isn't East Germany just yet. I think American authorities can tell the difference between what they do and the Stasi.

As in, I actually, literally think they can tell the difference. Nobody will be ending up in prison for posting the above. Seriously. Show me a judge who'll do that.

You don't get a 4-year philosophy degree before getting a JD in American law, and structurally answer to a constitution literally containing the words "Congress shall make no law ...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" which is the first amendment, and which has been judged and interpreted very carefully by 9 independent justices upholding Freedom for 220 years, while sending people to prison for publishing

" Apr 2016 - "

Not happening. Not in 2016, and not in 2020. People need some perspective here.

EDIT: getting a lot of downvotes. Show me anyone who is in prison for publishing " Apr 2016 - " or any other similar warrant canary. You people need to stop throwing around "a great way to end up in prison" like that.

I'm not defending the status quo, but the suggestion that anybody is going to prison for posting a warrant canary is too much, sorry.

It diminishes the conversation and criticism around the actual status quo.

You're right, no one is going to prison. However, a federal court case starts at 1.5 million to defend. Not many people have that in the bank. They can make you miserable for years. This has played a role in at least one person's suicide.

Getting on the bad side of the feds is pretty brutal.

I'd like to see a federal court case over publishing "Apr 2016 - " in a context that meant it's a canary. Go ahead and publish it. No one will sue you. Nobody will throw you in prison. Nobody will show up in black cars and take you to an interrogation. Nobody will put a bullet in your head. These questions about warrant canaries have been answered by judges, and not in the way that either I quoted or that you clarified.

I welcome any links you have that show otherwise.

I think with the claims you are making the onus is on you that one could get away with this.

>I think with the claims you are making the onus is on you that one could get away with this.

Fine. Here is the onus on me to show this:

“Warrant canaries have never been tested in court, but no case law suggests that they are in any way illegal,” says Nate Cardozo of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “In fact, existing law suggests that if a court were to examine a prohibition on warrant canaries, it would likely conclude that any such prohibition would run afoul of the First Amendment, even in the case of NSL and FISA requests.”

Source: https://gigaom.com/2014/10/10/are-warrant-canaries-legal-twi...

Now the onus is on anyone who disagrees with my referenced link, to show otherwise. Personally, I am fine with following the legal reading and guidance of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and you should be too.

The Warrant Canary article Wikipedia says, summarizing its three references: "Warrant canaries have been found to be legal by the United States Justice Department, so long as they are passive in their notifications."

Please link to any court cases to the contrary.

"The defendant merely published the string 'Apr 2016 -'" is what the defense's pretrial motion will say. It's not what the prosecution will say.

Two things,

1, you keep attempting to make my argument a straw man escalating the emotional impact of the consequences. First it's prison, now it's a bullet in the head. No one is claiming physical violence by the government other than you.

2, It's impossible to provide. Any case that lost would be secret due to national security reasons. You assert that this hasn't happened. Fine, believe what you wish. I assert that we don't know if it has happened or not. Because, again, we'd only know if the defendant "won".

I don't know how it suddenly became "your argument" the "first it's prison" isn't a straw man I introduced - I literally replied to someone who wrote:

>That's a great way to end up in prison

And I asked them to have a bit of perspective and not go off the deep end. You replied saying "However, a federal court case starts at 1.5 million to defend. Not many people have that in the bank. They can make you miserable for years. This has played a role in at least one person's suicide." I disagree that that is an outcome that will happen from ceasing to publish a warrant canary.

Nobody is going to do that over someone publishing 'Apr 2016 -'. Period.

And no, it's not impossible to provide evidence of this happening. Snowden leaked the secret program of surveilling hundreds of millions of Americans. You think someone couldn't leak a blog post about getting sued in secret court for publishing a 'Apr 2016 -' warrant canary? Really?

Let's have some perspective here.

Ah, but I used Aaron Swartz as a concrete example, for emotional impact. Hemingway would be another good example. Where as you are asserting full conspiracy nut with a bullet in the head.

I get it, you're an absence of evidence is evidence of absence guy. That's fine. We're prohibited from actually going and looking, so i think there's no way to tell one way or the other.

I don't think you can assign zero probability to prosecution for "April 2016 -". The whole weev debacle shows there can be a perfect storm of a bad person using something that's not legally rock solid that establishes case law. Apple can afford 1.5 million. Random startup by an ex drug dealer can't. And thus we get new case law.

Anyway. It has been fun to think about.

edit

I know it's bad form to talk about downvotes. logicallee has good points, i happen to disagree. Don't fall into the trap of downvoting them because you viscerally disagree with their opinion.

> I know it's bad form to talk about downvotes. logicallee has good points, i happen to disagree. Don't fall into the trap of downvoting them because you viscerally disagree with their opinion.

Seriously, of all the downvote abuse I've seen on HN, I think this is the worst. It's because of stuff like this that I think downvoting should be abolished. Stuff that breaks the rules should be flagged, and false flaggers should lose the privilege, and everything else should stand or fall on its own merit, according to the reader's judgment.

I miss the old (old) Slashdot meta-moderation system. If someone moderated a comment "Troll" merely because they disagreed with it, a meta-moderator (chosen at random from accounts with good karma) could fix it, anonymously. And if an account abused moderation, they could simply lose the privilege. And, of course, participants in a conversation couldn't moderate (still the case, I think). I still don't understand why Slashdot dumped that system, because it's the best I've ever seen anywhere on the Internet.

Depending on the intelligence and compassion of a judge is a great strategy. I'd bet that it works >50% of the time. But ask the legal counsel at a publicly traded company whether it's worth the gamble, and you'll get the same advice that the downvoters in here would give you, if they weren't in such a hurry.

Can you put your money where your mouth is ? Like, can you put an Ethereum "contract" or something that says you bet $5k or more that nobody in the US in the next 5 years will be charged for using a warrant canary ? Suppose there were a way to contract that, would you bet that way ?

yeah I'd bet that way. Go ahead and note down my email somewhere, if in the next five years anybody is charged in the United States for publishing "we haven't been served any secret court orders" (or similar), or for removing that text - which is the two parts of how a warrant canary works - then you can email me and I'll paypal you a token payment.

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