Reddit suspected to have been served with an NSL
It is suspected that Reddit has been [served with an NSL][schneier]. [National Security Letters (NSLs)][nsl] are subpoena served by the United States federal government and often come with a gag order that prevents the recipient from even stating that they received the letter. [Warrant canaries][canary] are used to circumvent gag orders by stating that requests have *not* been received, under the [legal theory][court] that, while courts can compel persons not to speak, they can't compel them to lie. [Reddit's canary has died][reddit-report]---the canary is absent from their most recent 2015 transparency report, where it was [present in the 2014 report][reddit-report-2014]. Does this mean that you should stop using Reddit? No; canaries are an important transparency method. If you are worried about your privacy, you shouldn't disclose the information to a third party to begin with. Note that this includes metadata that are gathered about you when you, for example, browse subreddits while logged in. You can help mitigate that by [browsing anonymously using Tor][donot], being sure never to log in during the same session. The website [Canary Watch][cw] is a website that tracks warrant canaries. I'm awaiting further analysis after the weekend. [schneier]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/04/reddits_warrant.html [nsl]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Letter [canary]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary [cw]: https://www.canarywatch.org/ [court]: https://gigaom.com/2014/10/10/are-warrant-canaries-legal-twitter-wants-to-save-techs-warning-signal-of-government-spying/ [reddit-report]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160331210850/https://www.reddit.com/wiki/transparency/2015 [reddit-report-2014]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160331204815/https://www.reddit.com/wiki/transparency/2014 [donot]: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/DoNotmaster
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