Wonder if they are ever subpoenaed in court to testify about it, if they lie they commit perjury if they tell they truth they break the rules of the NSL.
At the same time the govt probably does want them to cooperate, and doesn't want it to be a completely adversarial situation. I can see them buttering these companies up and offering "talking points" on how to specifically dodge these kind of questions. For example Dept. of State have media training, they set up adversarial training situations with fake role playing journalists asking "tough" questions then train employees to dodge them successfully. Very useful.
Same here I can see maybe PR spokespeople are urged maybe to say "we are not spying" because maybe the word "spying" has a specific meaning and given some technicality what they are doing is not "spying", stuff like that. Kind of like NSA has been saying they are not looking at everyone's emails. Well they are not people doing that, it all gets archived and stored probably based on some pattern. So they can clearly and proudly say they are not "reading" our information.
"Wonder if they are ever subpoenaed in court to testify about it, if they lie they commit perjury if they tell they truth they break the rules of the NSL."
That would only come into play if they're partly immunized and compelled to testify, in the Congress or a grand jury; otherwise they could plead the 5th.
At the same time the govt probably does want them to cooperate, and doesn't want it to be a completely adversarial situation. I can see them buttering these companies up and offering "talking points" on how to specifically dodge these kind of questions. For example Dept. of State have media training, they set up adversarial training situations with fake role playing journalists asking "tough" questions then train employees to dodge them successfully. Very useful.
Same here I can see maybe PR spokespeople are urged maybe to say "we are not spying" because maybe the word "spying" has a specific meaning and given some technicality what they are doing is not "spying", stuff like that. Kind of like NSA has been saying they are not looking at everyone's emails. Well they are not people doing that, it all gets archived and stored probably based on some pattern. So they can clearly and proudly say they are not "reading" our information.