Deeplinks Blog posts about National Security Letters
We announced Canary Watch a year ago as a coalition project to list Warrant Canaries and monitor them for changes or removal. Canary Watch was a joint project, with EFF, Freedom of the Press Foundation, NYU Law, Calyx and the Berkman Center.
Along the way, the project has been part of the massive popularization of the concept: we began with just eleven canaries listed, and now just a year later we have almost seventy. In the course of tracking those, we have learned many lessons about the different types of canaries that are present on the web, as well as what happens when a canary goes away.
Often overlooked in discussions of the USA FREEDOM Act passed in June are the changes made to the National Security Letter (NSL) statute. The law addresses some of the more obvious problems with NSLs but fails, by a long shot, to bring them up to the standard required by the U.S. Constitution. Most critically, USA FREEDOM did not fix the problem of overbroad, potentially eternal gag orders or the fact that the NSL statute relegates the court to little more than a rubber stamp.
We’re excited to announce that Canarywatch has added its 50th canary: First Look Media, the parent company for The Intercept—the news site created by journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill.
"Warrant canary" is a colloquial term for a regularly published statement that an internet service provider (ISP) has not received legal process that it would be prohibited from saying it had received, such as a national security letter.
When is a government rule not a rule? Making that question difficult, when it should be simple, seems to be the government’s leading strategy in a hearing this week in Twitter Inc.’s lawsuit challenging the government’s squelching of its transparency report. Twitter wants to provide a closer look at how often federal agents are demanding private user data for surveillance, and part of its suit fights back against the government's rules on what it can and cannot publish. But the Justice Department has asked a federal judge in Oakland to dismiss portions of Twitter’s lawsuit because, it says, the rules the government cited in denying Twitter the ability to be more transparent aren’t really rules. They’re more like guidelines, the agency says. If you’re having flashbacks about ''Pirates of the Caribbean'' and a certain Captain Barbossa, you’re not alone. More on that later.
"Warrant canary" is a colloquial term for a regularly published statement that an internet service provider (ISP) has not received legal process that it would be prohibited from saying it had received, such as a national security letter. The term "warrant canary" is a reference to the canaries used to provide warnings in coalmines, which would become sick from carbon monoxide poisoning before the miners would—warning of the otherwise-invisible danger. Just like canaries in a coalmine, the canaries on web pages “die” when they are exposed to something toxic—like a secret FISA court order.
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