Ryan Whitwam
Reddit removed a section from its 2015 transparency report,
but if you ask company representatives why, they won’t be able to tell
you. The removed text is what’s known as a “warrant canary,” a clever
way to signal that the government may have forced a company to hand over
information without actually saying it. As for what Reddit had to give up, that’s a secret — it has to be unless someone wants to spend a lot of time in jail.
In the company’s 2014 transparency report, the warrant
canary was still singing. It read, “As of January 29, 2015, reddit has
never received a National Security Letter, an order under the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, or any other classified request for user
information. If we ever receive such a request, we would seek to let the
public know it existed.” However, it’s unlikely Reddit would be able to
let anyone know, and that’s the purpose of the canary.
Many companies use a warrant canary in privacy and
transparency reports as a way of keeping users in the loop when it comes
to their data. Reddit, like other online communities, generates a lot
of user data. There might be times that federal law enforcement and intelligence
entities decide they need access to that data, and they will get it.
These National Security Letters or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
orders often come with a gag order. That means the company that is
served with the letter is not permitted by law to say they’ve gotten the
letter at all. What they can do, however, is tell you when they haven’t gotten one.
So, like the proverbial canary in the coal mine that dies
when exposed to toxic gas, the warrant canary dies when exposed to a
secret government demand for information. The thinking is that courts
can compel a company not to divulge the existence of a national security
order, but they cannot force a company to lie and say that it has not
received one. That’s probably all the information users will get,
though. When users noted the lack of a canary in the transparency 2015
report, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman replied on the site to say, “I’ve been advised not to say anything one way or the other.”
This may very well mean that US intelligence agencies have a
cache of data from Reddit that includes your personal activity. Much of
what happens on Reddit is public anyway, so any national security order
probably pertained to private messages or invite-only sub-Reddits.
We’ll probably never find out what exactly was handed over, but the
canary died to let us know something went down.
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