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What if companies that do not wish to do evil adopted unspoken signaling mechanism for silent protests? What if every time n NSLs were fulfilled since start of year, they donated to EFF? What if $1 was donated to EFF for every 1 GB of data they shared? Would that be illegal?



What you're talking about is referred to as a warrant canary. There's a nice Wikipedia entry on the subject, if you're interested. [1]

Check out [2] for an example of one.

Perhaps we should be pressuring companies like Dropbox (whom was implicated as "coming soon" in the documents leaked) to implement such a system.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

[2] http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

Edit: Now thinking about it, Dropbox was probably already hit with a request. Maybe we should focus on other services that may be of future interest to the government?


What if they released remarkably similar statements that very specifically denied the specific things they're not supposed to be admitting to doing...

Or perhaps that's the charitable interpretation.


I'm sure an Adwords campaign offering information on FISA would net you some data on who and where requests are being made. It wouldn't be explicit and the people wouldn't have to tell you WHY they are looking for information on FISA.

However, when you saw blips from people paying $99 for your packet of case law on 4th amendment protections with respect to stewardship of online data, you'd have the start of a signal. That is, for all of about ten minutes until you couldn't find a hosting provider or payment processor on Earth who would return your phone calls.

Not that it would matter because a "Chinese PLA hacker nuked your box, your bank account, and your house from orbit."

[Insert relevant quotes regarding government requests on named individuals from Eric Schmidt here.]


Of course it would be illegal. Same as if they said "eway eceivedray one-a ationalnay ecuritysay etterlay." Any way they intentionally communicate information is a disclosure. English language isn't treated specially.




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