Well, that's one way to get around a federal gag order.
Today on Reddit, a most timely Ask Me Anything: "We are ACLU lawyers and Nick Merrill of Calyx Institute. We're here to talk about National Security Letters and warrant canaries, because Reddit can't. AUA."
Here's an excerpt:
[Question from Redditor MASyndicate] Knowing what you know about the case, are you more hopeful for the future of Reddit and any other social media sites because of this or fearful? As we know, if it happened on Reddit, I have concerns that they might try to do the same things on other platforms, if they haven't already.
[ACLU] Hi, everyone. My name is Alex Abdo, and I am a staff attorney in the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. I'm excited to be here to help answer questions about warrant canaries and national-security surveillance requests. Thanks!
On your question, MASyndicate:
The truth is that we know virtually nothing about "the case." All we know is that reddit's warrant canary from its 2014 transparency report does not appear in its 2015 transparency report.
The hope is that we will eventually learn details about the case and have a public discussion about the nature of the surveillance and whether it is consistent with our expectations and laws.
More broadly, though, reddit's use of a warrant canary makes me more hopeful, because it is one of many signals from the tech community that privacy matters and that they are willing to fight for it.
[Calyx] Hi, this is Nick Merrill from The Calyx Institute. Because of everything I have learned over the past 12 years, I am not especially shocked that this has (allegedly) happened. After I sued the Department of Justice over the constitutionality of NSL's in 2004, the DoJ's inspector general released a report detailing FBI's use of NSLs. In that report they looked at the years 2003-2006 if I recall correctly. And in that time period, the FBI had issued something like 192,000 NSLs. If you do some quick math, that's getting close to one NSL per 1000 Americans. And FBI has continued to issue 10's of thousands of NSLs every year since. And that's not even counting what we learned through the Snowden revelations. So we know that warrantless surveillance is widespread. But the big change here is that companies are resisting, en masse. Apple has been very public with it. Google and Twitter have also been doing a lot of work behind the scenes.
One of the projects that my organization, The Calyx Institute has been working on is a project called Canary Watch where we track all the known warrant canaries set up by websites and online service providers. When we started there were only around a half dozen known warrant canaries. Now, due to growing awareness and the change in political climate, there are about 50, and we have a backlog of dozens more that we need to add.
I guess the TL/DR version of my answer is "more hopeful" because service providers are realizing that it's good for business for them to stand up for the rights of their users.
