Lol woah - maybe I should check HN more than once a week. Let's dive in!!

1. “I doubt they [international agencies] send the kind of subpoenas…” - It’s a gross display of willful ignorance to assume things just so it agrees with your opinion. This is Facebook’s Transparency report (https://transparency.fb.com/data/government-data-requests/co...) They are just one example, with hundreds of thousands of requests coming from outside of the United States. There are 195 countries in the world…170 of them have sent them to Facebook alone.

2. You are literally proving the point of why those data guides were created…so no one asks a company for data that they don’t have and waste everyones time/energy. The reality is that every company has some form of data…if a company didn’t have any sort of data how in the world would they be able to display any information, or do literally anything ever? There is always something to ask for.

3. Lol so many absurdities going on with this bullet so buckle in:

3.1 - “If your process of handling mail…” - So do you not use email? Most people graduated from mailing addresses to email addresses because it was a better way of doing things and easier than mail…most companies use emails to deal with subpoenas…a tool like Kodex is easier than email and takes the burdens away from this legal obligation…keeping the process difficult only makes it difficult on the company, not the govt.

3.2 - “USA has a slightly more repressive regime than [you] assumed…” - NDOs are used so the subject of a case isn’t tipped off. For example, would you prefer pedophiles to be told “the FBI just asked for the CSAM on your google drive” and have the pedophile go dark/get away, and continue to abuse innocent children as a result? Is that “repressive” towards the pedophile? Or a necessary legal vehicle to protect the innocent? Would you rather the USA take the unfortunate approach that some countries do, and not do anything about heinous crimes like that?

3.3 - “Who the government is spying on…” - “Spying” and “investigating” are two very different things. Choosing to use the language “spying” for a subpoena is either ignorance, or a determined effort to fit the narrative you want and demonize what is actually going on. Subpoena’s are legal documents that go through a court. Spying does not. That NSA/Snowden scandal had nothing to do with subpoenas…that was all Top Secret spy programs that did not involve courts, or legal documents…Subpoenas are all unclassified information used for investigations, not on-going spy programs.

3.4 - “Publicizing…Protected by first amendment…” - You can’t yell fire in a crowded movie theater. Aka Free speech is moot when it is “a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.” You have a right to express your opinions, desire’s etc, but not to put others in harms way. These investigations are to prevent harms.

3.5 - “Hide a subpoena from the user while it is in effect…” - Kodex makes it easier for the client to follow the law, and allows them to ethically follow up with the user once the law no longer prohibits the company from doing so. Would you rather hope the company just remembers to go back to the mail room and fish through a file cabinet to see which user should be notified each day when that isn’t a priority for the company’s bottom line? Or would you want the company to be automatically reminded when such a date comes? Keeping this process more disorganized than it needs to be just for the sake of silently convincing yourself you live on a higher moral plane is what is more unethical.

4. “Mass circumvention…” - You seem to be willfully ignoring the fact that consequences exist, once again. You know copyright infringement/file sharing pioneers like Napster were ultimately shut down…right? You know, because it was illegal and the consequence was…being shut down? If you try to say that changed the music industry to help the onset of streaming/Spotify you might be right, but then why would you ignore that something like Kodex can be the same type disruption to subpoena processing that streaming was to music…making it easier and more accesible? Moreover, it wasn’t the general disregard for the rules that created Spotify, it was the realization of the desire for instant access to every song, rather than pay $1.29 for some songs.

5. “The process doesn’t need to be clunky, messy, or disorganized” - Thank you, I agree!

I’d encourage you to learn more about this topic, because you seem to have put little effort into understanding what’s really going on, and instead have chosen to just yell at the sky/internet about what you think is going on - simply for the sake of yelling.