the cause of this output is the following line in /etc/pam.d/sshd: # In Debian 4.0 (etch), locale-related environment variables were moved to # /etc/default/locale, so read that as well. session required pam_env.so user_readenv=1 envfile=/etc/default/locale
i'm guessing from the comment that user_readenv=1 is in place primarily to allow overrides of the default locale? etch was quite some time ago, possibly preceding support for SendEnv? that seems sufficient workaround if user_readenv is deprecated, but this is all speculative.
