Reddit’s Warrant Canary Just Died

This is really fascinating. I just read the entire warrant canaries page on Wiki. I had never heard of this before

 

Not completely surprised, but sad nonetheless. I love Reddit, but around the subreddits I frequent it is repeated to post as if the authorities are watching to begin with.

 

given all the hate communities that site gives a home to, really not that surprising

 

This was also the first time I'd heard of warrant canaries... the slow death of privacy in the information era is honestly pretty scary.

 

Imagine living somewhere like Turkey or China, where social media is blocked in times of "crisis".

 

Okay forgive my ignorance please So a warrant canary is basically a way of saying that a site has not been issued a subpoena from a government organization? And if that is correct, what exactly is this specific article about reddit saying? That reddit's warrant canary is no longer, and that the government can issue subpoenas if it wanted to? And if that is the case, I wouldn't have thought a way existed in the first place to stop the government from issuing a subpoena for anything. Then again I think I'm just completely confused.

 

From my understanding, every year, reddit has put a statement in their transparency report stating that they have never received a certain type of surveillance request from the government. This year, that statement was removed. It is illegal for them to disclose if they have received that sort of request, but it is not illegal to disclose that they have not. Some entities have started putting "warrant canaries" in their transparency reports by default, then removing them should they receive a certain type of request. It's a way to inform their users that something happened without directly telling them. Pretty clever if you ask me.

 

I gotcha! That makes sense - especially the "illegal for them to disclose if they have received that sort of request, but it is not illegal to disclose that they have not". Thanks for the explanation.

 

Sure thing!

 

So, is there any use speculating what exactly it would've been that caused the government to request information, or is it likely to be something so un-obvious in reddit's pages and pages of information that speculation would be useless?

 

I don't think there's anyway to know for sure at all.

 

Makes sense, felt kinda like that'd be the case as I typed it. Reddit is completely lost on me as a service. Saying that, I'm sure we'll see people trying to pay detective now that this has come to light.