Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but you can admit to a gag order being placed on you. As in, FB and Google would be totally entitled to say "there is a gag order preventing us from going into this". So they don't need to convey anything.
Hundreds of thousands of these have been issued, and the above story (about the owner of an ISP) is one of the few cases where someone fought back and won the right to speak about it.
Aha. Thank you for citing a source on this one. I still wonder though, if your involvement has been directly leaked, whether you are able to confirm the existence of it. I suppose it wouldn't be a course of action any lawyer recommends.
Particularly at the rate the Obama Admin has been prosecuting people on leaks, there's little question it would still be very advisable to err on the side of extreme caution.
> Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but you can admit to a gag order being placed on you.
At least sometimes that it is the case, though I don't know if it generally is.
If you have been authorized to have access to classified information, such as (if one accepts the authenticity of the presentation that the Guardian and WaPo have reported on) even the existence of PRISM, on the other hand, there are fairly substantial legal consequences to unauthorized divulgence of that information, and those consequences don't necessarily go away because someone else gave out the information first.
