Maybe these companies have VOLUNTARILY lied, that's possible, but that's also rather unlikely as that would suggest they are friendly with the NSA for some reason.
That is the logic behind the idea of a warrant canary, but my understanding is that they have never actually been tested.
The frequency with which rsync.net representatives bring up their warrant canary in community conversations (such as those on HN) suggests to me that their canary is still legitimately alive (one would expect them to be less proud of it, where it coerced), but do we really know that is the case? The very nature of these things prevents us from saying things like that with certainty.
For a time, until USA PATRIOT Act was amended, these letters were allowed to forbid you from consulting a lawyer about the letter. So if the letter included demands that it was not allowed to include (perhaps: "Lie."), how would you even know that those demands were not allowed? For that matter, if you received a letter today that said this amendment to the Act was not relevant in this particular circumstance and you were not allowed to consult a lawyer, what would you do? Call their bluff?
So what are you supposed to do if you're not allowed to disclose something and someone directly asks you about it? An obvious evasion is clearly going to be a de facto admission, and you're not allowed to admit it, so you either have to lie or mislead. I'm not sure the distinction between a lie and a misleading statement is particularly meaningful in this context.
None of the big tech companies have an incentive to cover up: for them wiretapping both an extra cost and a continuous PR nightmare.
But hinting that you're bound by a gag order shouldn't be permitted by the gag order since that would compromise its effectiveness -- certainly a risk averse corporation could imagine a prosecutor arguing as much.
>None of the big tech companies have an incentive to cover up: for them wiretapping both an extra cost and a continuous PR nightmare.
As I understand it the government compensates them for the inconvenience.
I wonder how that works. If stories about pervasive US surveillance of a burgeoning tech startup cause their european market to be DOA, how could that startup be correctly compensated?