BestUser

a little over a decade ago, there was a big trend in the tech industry to add warrant canaries. the idea is that they may be able to stop you from saying when you’ve received a secret warrant, but they can’t stop you from saying when you haven’t received one. so a bunch of tech companies put language on their website about how they’d never received one of these subpoenas, with the implication being that when that statement disappeared, you would know that they’d gotten one.

before being bought by automattic, tumblr published semiannual privacy reports at https://www.tumblr.com/transparency. the july–december 2015 report is the last to include a canary. the january–june 2016 report says that they received between less than 250 “national security requests”, a category which includes these secret warrants but is not necessarily limited to them.

automattic now just straight up tells you how many warrants with a non-disclosure order tumblr receives, so maybe the government doesn’t include the “you can’t even admit you’ve received one” order any more. or maybe these are just the ones they’re allowed to talk about. (the “non-disclosure” part can also refer to a prohibition on telling affected users that tumblr gave their data to the government)

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HELLO!!!!!!!!!!