How can you confirm something that has happened when by law you legally can’t?

The answer is a warrant canary, a phrase or paragraph that is purposely omitted, and that’s exactly what popular forum Reddit, Inc. did Thursday when it published its annual transparency report.

Each year Reddit publishes its transparency report and details regular data requests via subpoenas  and court orders, but the new report was different for what it lacked, in this case, the following paragraph that had appeared in the previous report:

“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.” The company also noted in the last sentence of that section, “If we ever receive such a request, we would seek to let the public know it existed.”

According to Reuters, National security letters, which is likely what Reddit has received, are nearly always accompanied by an open-ended gag order barring companies from disclosing the contents of the demand for customer data, meaning that a company such as Reddit is unable to say that it has received such as request.

A canary warning or specifically a warrant canary here is where a company simply omits saying something it had said previously, in this case, Reddit not saying it had never received a National Security Letter; it’s a sly way to get around the gag order but likewise it is tentatively legal given that Reddit itself has not actually broken the gag order by saying anything at all about the data request.

In a thread on Reddit itself Chief Executive Officer Steve Huffman (known as spez on the site) all but officially confirmed a request had been made, responding to someone pointing out the paragraph is missing by saying that “even with the canaries, we’re treading a fine line” before adding in another comment “I’ve been advised not to say anything one way or the other.”

Good for Reddit

As much as they are proverbially skating on thin ice so to speak in using the warrant canary, Reddit should be congratulated for creating the warrant canary to begin with to let users, and others know that they had been served with a National Security Letter.

While we’ll never know exactly what was in the request, it’s hard to believe that someone on Reddit was conspiring in terrorism or other seriously nefarious activities, particularly following Reddit’s great social justice purge of 2015.

The use of National Security Letters has long be criticized by civil liberties groups and if anything good comes from this case it’s that their use by the Government has been thrown into the spotlight again.

Image credit: mlcastle/Flickr/CC by 2.0