I know that a law has been proposed which would effectively make them illegal.
> Despite this, others seem to be using warrant canaries.
I believe that the source of your confusion is that we are presently discussing a proposed law which may come into effect in the future, while you are examining the past when that law was not in effect.
If I understand you correctly, your main points are:
1. The law can never compel you to make a false statement.
2. Lots of firms are doing it, and they probably know what they're doing.
For point 1, if you can show me a credible legal authority arguing that British law can never, under any circumstances, compel a person to lie, I'll accept that I was wrong, and I'll thank you for teaching me something new this day.
But rather than do that, you've suggested that I should try to disprove your claim. Well, I admit that I can't offer a rigorous disproof, but that's to be expected: disproof is always hard. (Can you disprove the existence of sasquatches?)
So let's put that aside, at least until a real lawyer gets involved, and move on to point 2.
And for 2, I don't think you'd say that if you'd seen as much legal bullshit in your time as I have.
Do you remember, back in the 90s, envelopes that said, "By opening this envelope, you agree to the Terms & Conditions enclosed." Or more recently, have you seen online services whose Terms & Conditions say something like, "We can change these Terms & Conditions at any time, without telling you." They're both obvious bullshit, and yet in both cases lawyers kept pushing them onto their clients until a court ruled against the practices.
So I believe that the warrant canary is another piece of obvious bullshit, which will die a quick death when a court examines it. In fact, it's possible that a court already HAS ruled against the idea, but we just don't know about it. Or, to put it another way, I think there's every chance that some of the warrant canaries we are seeing published now are lies. That would certainly explain why we've yet to see the non-renewal of a warrant canary!
1. I actually never claimed anything about what the law says, I said the the concept of a warrant canary assumes that the law cannot do a particular thing.
2. I thought that the types of organizations which would use a warrant canary would be slightly more resistant to legal superstitions and overreach.
I.e. my answer to number 2 above led me to begin with the proposition that warrant canaries were probably legal, and therefore I wanted a disproof. Also, a disproof should in theory be easy; a single example where the law can compel anyone to make a false statement would suffice. It would be wholly impractical for me to try to prove that there are no such rules anywhere in the law, and I am not a lawyer, so I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to.
I also checked canarywatch.org and noticed that Adobe have a warrant canary and, yes, I'd like to believe that Adobe's lawyers know what they're doing.
And after giving this some thought, I think you've persuaded me, but with one important caveat: it's different in Britain. American warrant canaries might work, but British ones are bullshit.
It's all about freedom of speech. As far as I can tell, all the legal theories about compelled speech come down to this: freedom of speech implies freedom from compelled speech. But in the UK there is no constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech so, while I'm not aware of any law compelling people to lie, neither am I aware of there being anything to prevent such a law from existing.
Thanks for the interesting discussion. I've learned something today. :)