No one at Reddit has said anything officially, but there are lots of people reading into something that isn’t there. And they don’t like what they aren’t seeing. Sounds a bit convoluted but it all has to do with what is widely known as a “warrant canary.” (In January, Slate contributor Dan Gillmor explained why warrant canaries are so important and argued that their use should be expanded). The message board site that has a fiercely loyal user base included the following paragraph in its first transparency report:
national security requests
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.
reddit supports reform of government surveillance programs and joined 86 other groups by signing an open letter to Congress in 2013.
When Reddit published its second transparency report on Thursday, it didn’t take long for users to notice that small paragraph was gone. That seemed to be a pretty clear indication that Reddit has actually received a national security letter that normally comes with a gag order prohibiting the recipient from discussing its contents.
The company is not commenting. “Even with the canaries, we’re treading a fine line,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who goes by “spez” on the site, wrote. “The whole thing is icky, which is why we joined Twitter in pushing back.” Huffman is referring to how Reddit was one of the companies that filed a friend of the court brief in Twitter’s 2014 lawsuit against the Department of Justice on the issue.
Although it’s impossible to know for sure, the government likely called on Reddit to provide identifying information on one or more of its anonymous users, such as IP data. Authorities may have also been interested in private messages between members. “Reddit does not require users to reveal their identities and stores less customer data overall compared to email or other social media such as Facebook,” notes Reuters.
Edward Snowden was one of the people who raised the issue on Twitter, wondering: “Is dissent a threat to national security?”
But there is a slim chance everyone may be reading too much into some missing words. There has long been a debate about whether “warrant canaries” are even legal, something Reddit itself mentioned in its amicus brief in the Twitter case. “And thus, Reddit is now involved in a case over whether or not the very notion of a warrant canary itself is legal,” notes Techdirt, “and that, alone, may be a reason why it chose not to include it this time around.”
