So, is it possible for them to say "We have NOT received 8 or 10 requests"? This clearly doesn't say how many they have received but gives a clue that they might have received 9.
Please ignore me if this is silly.
I think we get the impression that it's not that way based on our perception of corporations driving money-filled trucks through legal loopholes, but it's just not the same thing to a judge. Regardless of whether it is to you and I.
I get the impression that not everyone is playing by the same set of rules, not that they have particularly clever lawyers (although, most of them probably have that as well).
I often wish law was written more like a computer program, with lots of unit tests up front. But I have no idea how to actually achieve that. Real life is so much more complex than input to any computer program that an attempt to formalise law even more than it already is formalised would just result in it being totally incomprehensible to the people who have to follow it (as opposed to mostly). Plus the man on the street tends to get very angry when people who are "obviously" guilty get off on a technicality.
Take a law like: No driving a motor vehicle in the park.
Obviously that means no cars, but does a wheelchair count? How about a power assisted bike?
But I know what they meant, and keep my motorcycle off the bicycle trail. However, the pedant and software developer in me is bothered just a little when I read those signs.
I.e. put up a cryptographically signed and timestamped statement that you haven't received a request, then don't update it (or simply take it down) once you receive a request.
Don't some open source projects do this?
http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
It's not as sophisticated as the blockchain, etc., but about as good - if you pick sensitive pieces of financial news it's clear you could not have known about them in advance. Or sports results.
Another law of successful (or at least apparently effective) "law hacking": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_in...
Common law systems really aren't as simple as "only intent matters, absolutely nothing clever is tolerated", as many suggest. The problem is mostly that, whenever computers are involved, people involved in the justice system seem to have their sensibilities bizarrely warped. Removing the technological element is likely the best way to get people to think about things sensibly. It is not so much "legal trickery" as it is "framing the matter in terms that the court already understands".