Should we be concerned that the Kiwi Farms Gag Order / Secret Court Order Canary has been Triggered?

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It's over!
Execute order 66!

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CWorm said:
Well, a secret gag order seems like a stretch.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act,_Title_V#National_security_authorities

Three national security authorities were modified under title V of the Patriot Act. FISA granted counterintelligence access to telephone toll and transactional records through the use of National Security Letters (NSLs).[13] It required electronic communication service providers to comply with a request for subscriber information and toll billing records information, or electronic communication transactional records when so asked by the FBI. The disclosure by any recipient of an NSL was prohibited as under § 2709(c) they were not able to tell anyone that the FBI had sought or obtained access to records of the person who was being targeted by the NSL. The Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978 gives the FBI authority to require financial institutions to provide information about their customer’s or an entity’s financial records.[14] The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires a consumer reporting agency to provide the FBI the names and addresses of all financial institutions at which a consumer maintains or has maintained an account.[15]
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The workaround for this law was a warrant canary. Which The Farms used to have but now does not.

Honestly, it was only a matter of time before The Farms got one. I bet all the VPN companies have one too.

Interestingly the ACLU challenged the nondisclosure part of the NSL in court and won.

In 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit on behalf of an unknown Internet Service Provider against the U.S. government (American Civil Liberties Union v. Ashcroft (2004)[18]), contending that the NSLs used under 18 U.S.C. § 2709 violated the First and Fourth Amendments of the US Constitution. The ACLU's reasoning was that:

  • Section 2709 failed to spell out any legal process whereby a telephone or Internet company could try to oppose an NSL subpoena in court, and
  • Section 2709 prohibited the recipient of an NSL from disclosing that he had received such a request from the FBI, and outweighs the FBI's need for secrecy in counter-terrorism investigations.
The court granted the plaintiff's motion, agreeing that the NSLs violated the Fourth Amendment because their use "effectively bars or substantially deters any judicial challenge to the propriety of an NSL request". The court also found that the prohibitions of disclosure in 18 U.S.C. § 2709(c), which it described as being "unable to sever from the remainder of the statute", was an "unconstitutional prior restraint on speech in violation of the First Amendment".
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Gustav Schuchardt said:
You have to wonder what those VPN companies would do if they got sent a National Security Letter demanding they de-anonymize the list of IP addresses from The Farms.

I'm guessing they'll roll over. Or shut down, like Lavabit did.
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VPN companies oriented towards privacy literally cannot do this because they do not store enough information to do it, if I recall.
 
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Good observation. May it have to do with KF's coverage of the recent shooting in Germany?

Did anyone notice any other changes or silent removal of content?

Gustav Schuchardt said:
You have to wonder what those VPN companies would do if they got sent a National Security Letter demanding they de-anonymize the list of IP addresses from The Farms.

I'm guessing they'll roll over. Or shut down, like Lavabit did.
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The VPN companies shouldn't be able to do so, as long as they truly keep no logs of any kind. Can't give out information that doesn't exist.
Which is something KF should consider doing.
 
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HTTP Error 404 said:
The two always mentioned are Private Internet Access and Nord, and I've been told each are horrible and to use the other one for almost the exact same reasons by different people. I guess ProtonMail has a VPN, too, now?
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I would trust PIA over Nord, but I don't see why you can't use Tor in this case.

In the past PIA was verified to not log, but that may have changed.
 
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JoshPlz said:
The VPN companies shouldn't be able to do so, as long as they truly keep no logs of any kind. Something KF should consider doing.
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When Christchurch happened and NZ tried to go after the posters in the thread, Null nuked logging of some kind. I don't know the specifics and don't know if it was left disabled. This was when he added the warrant canary.
 
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X Prime said:
VPN companies oriented towards privacy literally cannot do this because they do not store enough information to do it, if I recall.
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The NSA could just tell the FBI to send them a National Security Letter demanding they keep the data and not tell anyone. Or install NSA supplied boxes of tricks on the same network as their servers so it could log all the connections. If you have loads of money, computing power and talented people and the power of NSLs anything is possible.

If you look at what happened to Lavabit the NSL told the operator to handover his SSL keys, presumably so that an NSA server could do a Man In The Middle. They had to do that because he'd designed his service to make it hard for law enforcement to subpoena information. We know about that because the dude was brave/stubborn enough to shut down his whole business rather than comply. Now if it were your business would you do that or just suck it up, comply and continue to make money? How many percent of people are going to go down fighting the man and end up penniless rather than suck it up and continue to operate? I think it's reasonable to assume that all VPN companies have made their peace with the NSA, regardless of their public pronouncements given the NSA has never to my knowledge complained that VPNs are making it harder to track down criminals and terrorists.

VPNs have their uses but they don't protect you from the NSA. Or from any of the Five Eyes intelligence agencies who can request the NSA help them out.
 
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