>There is no such thing as a legal obligation to lie.
So what are you supposed to do if you're not allowed to disclose something and someone directly asks you about it? An obvious evasion is clearly going to be a de facto admission, and you're not allowed to admit it, so you either have to lie or mislead. I'm not sure the distinction between a lie and a misleading statement is particularly meaningful in this context.
You can say you are not in a legal position to comment on the issue: for a company with scores of lawyers, it's easy enough to hint that you are bound by gag order.
None of the big tech companies have an incentive to cover up: for them wiretapping both an extra cost and a continuous PR nightmare.
>You can say you are not in a legal position to comment on the issue: for a company with scores of lawyers, it's easy enough to hint that you are bound by gag order.
But hinting that you're bound by a gag order shouldn't be permitted by the gag order since that would compromise its effectiveness -- certainly a risk averse corporation could imagine a prosecutor arguing as much.
>None of the big tech companies have an incentive to cover up: for them wiretapping both an extra cost and a continuous PR nightmare.
As I understand it the government compensates them for the inconvenience.
> As I understand it the government compensates them for the inconvenience.
I wonder how that works. If stories about pervasive US surveillance of a burgeoning tech startup cause their european market to be DOA, how could that startup be correctly compensated?
All big companies have incentive to stay on the government's good side. There are too many laws; everyone's guilty of something. Selective enforcement is an amazing tool.
So what are you supposed to do if you're not allowed to disclose something and someone directly asks you about it? An obvious evasion is clearly going to be a de facto admission, and you're not allowed to admit it, so you either have to lie or mislead. I'm not sure the distinction between a lie and a misleading statement is particularly meaningful in this context.
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