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Comment by jkaplowitz | Hacker News Reader

As I said, laws that prohibit companies like Apple from disclosing something are very different from laws that force them to affirmatively make false statements.

Your citation falls in the first category. I’m well aware that such laws do exist, and I alluded to some of them in my comment (e.g. National Security Letters).

But a law that allowing the government to oblige Apple to lie about whether they can access iCloud, as you said exists, would fall in the second category. This would go far beyond simply prohibiting a disclosure.

Can you identify any US law in the second category? Not only don’t I believe that such a law exists, other more ordinary laws like the FTC Act make many such lies illegal in the commercial context.

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> As I said, laws that prohibit companies like Apple from disclosing something are very different from laws that force them to affirmatively make false statements.

1. Apple tells users that they don't snoop on iCloud data, and sprinkles this marketing statement by assuring users that they are literally incapable of doing so.

2. US government lawfully forces Apple to gather and share intelligence, with an adjacent gag order. Apple changes a few settings on their backed and issues updates to to iPhones, along with publicly disclosed changes. Apple - as any business wishing to still exist in a year (or the management wishing to keep their seats) - complies with government's demands to the letter.

3. Gag order literally renders Apple and any person aware, [edit: s/incapable/disallowed/] of stating "we started logging this data" or "we have not been logging this data in the past, but..."

4. Apple logs and shares data, has to lie to customers to abide the law.

Step 4 still doesn't require Apple to lie about what they are or are not doing, it just requires Apple not to repeat or update their previous statement which might have been invalidated by government orders in between, at least not in the present tense with respect to their activities after the government orders.

In particular, it does not prevent them from removing any such invalidated statement from their website, although it's possible they'd have to do that removal as part of a broader overhaul of the relevant page to prevent it from being effectively a disclosure by obvious minimal page diff.

It really looks like you are agreeing but being pedantic about the wording

It’s possible, but I don’t think we’re fully agreeing.

To me, a government being able to compel silence from / prohibit disclosure by a private company or person feels much less awful than a government being able to force them to say something false.

Those are not even in the same category of acceptability for me. The second one is pretty much never acceptable; the first one sometimes is, though of course not always.

I think the other commenter was saying that US law allows the government to oblige Apple in the second way, in other words to affirmatively make false statements. I was saying it does not and probably constitutionally cannot. That seems like a clear disagreement to me.

They and I are, however, agreeing that US law allows the government to compel Apple to keep silent about certain things. This includes not disclosing that certain prior statements which may have been true at the time have subsequently become false.

Not being allowed to say "something has changed" and being required to pretend nothing has changed is basically the same thing in all but wording. The effect is the same.

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