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US Government Seizes Email of WikiLeaks Volunteer
bs0d3 writes "The U.S. Department of Justice has forced Gmail and Sonic.net to hand over the personal information of Jacob Appelbaum, a WikiLeaks volunteer. Sonic says they fought to keep the DoJ out of Appelbaum's records, which was very expensive but 'the right thing to do.' Google said, 'we comply with the law,' although 'Both Google and Sonic pressed for the right to inform Mr. Appelbaum of the secret court orders, according to people familiar with the investigation.' The collected information and the nature of the investigation remain classified. Applebaum's Gmail correspondence seized by the DoJ dates back to November 1, 2009, which is believed to be the month that WikiLeaks contributor and Army Private Bradley Manning allegedly began communication with Julian Assange. Last year, federal prosecutors used a similar subpoena to obtain information pertaining to Applebaum's Twitter account."
1. Encryption
2. Encryption
3. Encryption
As I understand it, the 4th Amendment is generally extended to cover contents of communications, meaning a warrant is supposed to be required for such contents. However, as I understand it, the current laws make a difference between recent communications and less recent ones, meaning that old emails can be obtained at a lower burden (and via a subpoena) while newer emails may require a warrant.
Note that all that is required for a subpeona is for the DoJ to say they think there is content in the emails which probably relates to an on-going criminal investigation..... So historical data is up for grabs just because someone thinks it might be relevant.......
Note that these apply only to communications hosted on third parties. It seems to me prudent to actually download all your communictions and stop relying on either IMAP or webmail interfaces, so that the contents can no longer be subject to subpeona.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Run your own mail server.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
It's unfortunate that the DOJ can now seize emails whenever they feel like it without providing a reason, but I'd imagine there was a lot more pressure with this one than there is typically since this is a federal investigation. What next though? Jacob Appelbaum gets to disappear w a black bag? What exactly does the DOJ do nowadays?
And then there's statements like this...
"that raising the standard for obtaining information under ECPA may substantially slow criminal and national security investigations."
And that's a federal DA speaking, like I get he convicts pedos and murders and stuff, but have you ever heard of justice and ethics dude? Your DA score card isn't worth 1/1000 of a human life.
And here's what makes me shake my head...
Doing anything controversial on the internet... rule 101, don't tie personal information to your accounts. The technology available nowadays makes it mostly possible.
Isn't one of the requirements for legal action the notification of what specific charges one has filed against him, for the purposes of a speedy and competent defence?
Since when does the government have the authority to conduct secret searches, siezures, and investigations of private citizens without disclosure of an offical charge?
I will be soooo glad when that fascist George Bush is out of the White House! Shit like this will not happen when Obama is finally inaugurated! Change is coming!
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
> WikiLeaks volunteer
Does this imply that some people involved with Wikileaks were paid? (Besides lawyers and besides the Australian rapist in chief, although he apparently managed to screw his book deal after he found out that the book was not going to be "one of the unifying documents of our generation" after all).
lucm, indeed.
Break the law, you get what you get.
This is why if you're going to be doing stuff that you want to keep private, you encrypt it. If he was conducting wikileaks business over gmail using unencrypted email, that's very sad for Mr. Applebaum.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
At least they didn't just have a drone fire a hellfire missile into his apartment.
Just pretend not to understand secret law...if that fails... "well excuuuuuuuuuuse me!"
Why would *anyone* involved in something as sensitive as WikiLeaks trust a webmail provider of any kind, or any third-party email storage? Run your own mail server, download your mails immediately, and store all emails locally on an encrypted drive. That won't protect new emails in transit (that's what GPG is for), but it'll protect existing emails. I can understand people using webmail when they don't really care. But in this case, it seems ridiculous.
for privacy use Hushmail.com
I'm frankly amazed that PGP / GnuPG hasn't caught on by now. I mean, it's almost 2012 for pete's sake - why are we still sending emails in the clear? Maybe events like this will make people rethink the importance of privacy in communication...
Jacob is a contributor to the tor project, I am sure he is extremely aware of the privacy issues of using an email provider.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Forgive me for being a bit undereducated on this front, but what exactly are examples of developers building open source 'cloud infrastructure'? Are there projects feasible to implement on a home server? I'd love to have a web accessible 'private cloud' to phase out my old VPN...
If you stick your tongue out at the authorities it should come as no surprise when they come down on you like a ton of bricks.. no sympathy.. stupid move
I see a lot of talk about technical solutions, not using free email, et cetera. If you think things through, you will see that none of that matters at all. Firstly, it's a safe bet that someone in the US Government not hampered by even the pretense of following the law already had all Jacob's official correspondence, encrypted or not. As I've posted multiple times already (see my previous posts), AUSCANNZUKUS has had access to a production quantum computer system capable of cracking PKI for many years, running as a virtual quantum machine on a winner-take-all style recurrent topological quantum neural network based on a physical system composed of non-abelian anyons (e.g. solitons) in a two-dimensional electron gas (e.g. in a HEMT, now present in most computers). For insight into this little-known factoid, digest this published research. Presumably, someone tipped off DOJ that there was something in Jacob's correspondence worth looking at. For those of you not yet willing to believe that PKI was cracked long ago, it's also rather trivial to inject a key logger onto most anyone's system, which is just as good as cracking PKI and ALSO defeats synchronous shared-secret cryptography. Personally, I'm disinclined to believe in such things, but I saw indirect evidence of it and figured out (after years of monomaniacal research) exactly what it must be and how it must work. Email me for details, or wait for the book.
Second, to the silly posters who wish to teach Jacob security fundamentals, you should be aware that he MAINTAINS THE TOR PROJECT, and is a member of the cDc. He certainly knows more than you or I about security fundamentals, and I've been a CISSP for years, wrote banking software, and was a security lead for Symantec. Do you really think that the MAINTAINER OF THE TOR PROJECT does not know how to become anonymous online? Hacktivismo is a spin-off of the cDc, and Wikileaks is a Hacktivismo project. That detail still has not been in the media, as far as I can tell, but it is obvious to anyone who looks into the topic, and is certainly known to three-letter agencies. Just google for "disruptive compliance" and their mission statement floats right to the top (this is a Google hack, from the people who wrote Goolag). Consider Wikileaks, and then answer this question posed by that document in 2003 (the year the Wikileaks project began), "But what disruptively compliant, hacktivist applications shall we write?"
Third, in case this hasn't been pointed out before, Wikileaks did not break any laws. If they had, you can bet the US DOJ would have ALREADY charged someone with something, rather than trumping up a sex offense at just the right time. FYI, the Swedish attorney who charged Julian Assange with a sex offense is the SAME Swedish attorney who represented the CIA for the Extraordinary Rendition trials, which makes him a CIA asset by definition. What Jacob Applebaum did was travel to Iceland and meet with other Wikileaks people for a few weeks. It's safe to say there was online correspondence, too. It's also safe to say, unless someone was downright stupid, that any truly sensitive communication was done anonymously. The ENTIRE POINT of Wikileaks was to set up the document submission policy to keep submitters anonymous, to make it IMPOSSIBLE to pressure the Wikileaks journalists into revealing sources (as governments have done to so many journalists recently). You can't tell what you don't know! If a source (e.g. Private Manning) is foolish enough to REVEAL THEMSELF then they are going to get in trouble. Even then, one can make a VERY STRONG argument that the documents he leaked (assuming he did it) reveal WAR CRIMES, in which case he was morally AND LEGALLY required to leak them, given that the usual chain of command was CLEARLY n
to think, why would anyone doing anything anti gov or illegal use a free email server or even keep the emails on the server. Cant be that hard to download all your emails from a hosted server and store them on an encrypted usb drive. Would it have been that hard to pay $20 per year for a shared hosting/vps not on US soil?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
How cute, arguing about whether or not the government is behaving properly.
Accept the facts: the rules that apply to you do not apply to the government, especially the secret bits of it. Not because you can't find a statute to support your argument, but because they DON'T CARE and will ignore the rules when it suits them.
And they have bigger, badder guns than you do, and are able to send you off to foreign prisons if they figure it will shut you up.
In movies the Good Guys can win. This is real life though.
Three Squirrels
Considering the United States is already pretty much strip-searching him whenever he goes near a border, you'd think they already know far more about him than they wanted.
Apparently there's a sort of "Do Not Fly Without TSA Harassment" list.
When the POTUS can literally designate you a terrorist and assassinate you at will, then you can pretty much forget any other rights you "think" you have. Americans have been compliant in handing over every right over the last decade. It's sad how low we've....hey... look! A terrorist...someone protect me! *sob*
Jake, sorry to hear about you getting into trouble with the big dogs, and hopefully you get out of it. And if you talk to your sister Bonita Applebum, tell her she's gotta put me on.
Bonita, Bonita, Bonita.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
The point isn't "Jake's mail should be encrypted". Jake, being a pretty well known crypto advocate and analyst, knows this. The point is that the government has seized his records and communication, with no apparent cause. Likewise, he was one of three Wikileaks affiliated Twitter users who had all access records handed to the government, and DMs as well I believe. He's been detained at nearly every re-entry into the US for the last couple of years.
The point isn't "sucker should use crypto" or "well obey the law then", it's simple harassment of a citizen for acting, not illegally, but in ways the govt. and large private interests don't like. Had he broken a law, they've had their chance to pick him up at any number of border crossings rather than just sit him in a room and stare at him for two hours while planes are missed, etc. This is just the price of being a staunch activist for privacy and strong ubiquitous crypto today.
I like music
And torture = broken encryption.
So no, encryption wont protect sensitive emails.
But why is someone who is involved with breaking into the private emails of government employees, a hero, but when the government returns the favor, they are a matre? Pretty hypocritcal. I'm all for open government. But every intimate detail isnt needed, nor in the best interest of the public. So I hardly feel bad for someone who enables intrusion when they get the exact same treatment back. In order to set a precedent, shouldnt the efforts of such people to be setting a good example? Fight to open unnessarily classified documents and post them via the Freedom of Information Act, instead of stealing and making yourself a criminal. Use the system. Maters are so 1000 years ago.
is the key word.
The USA government of Barak Hussien Obama II must employee its illegeal rendition and tourture tactics not on Employees of USA or intrnational companies and corporations, i.e. Sony, ha ha, but on "Volunteers"!
So under the DoJ's Holder's interpretation of "Law" and person "Volunteer" does not have claiment to USA Constitutional Law, USA Statutes, States Constitutional Laws, Stales Statues, Local Laws and Statutes and heavens forebid the ... Rights of Prisoners of War by the Geneva Convention.
Well.
Will we see the lifeless body of the "Volunteer" splayed on Obama's White House door step with Obama joyfully standing above and eating the "Volunteer's" heart, with great sexual enjoyment, he ejaculates in his $60K Armanine slacks and with relish, I ask.
What a great cad this Obama thing.
==
There is a difference. How do you intend to encrypt something with your rubber hose? (No, seriously! I can think of one scheme, thought it's hardly secure.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_hands_wikileaks_volunteers_gmail_data_to_us.php
If you haven't seen it, the DEFCON 18 talk about this it is WELL worth it. They specifically talk about Google and how easy it is for local and state officials (forget the NSA and feds for a momenet) to get email envelope information and cell phone records w/o a warrant:
DEFCON 18: Your ISP and the Government: Best Friends Forever 1/3
One of the most chilling things in my book is they show that when a crime happens, one of the first things some local police do is get (w/o a warrant...) the records of whose cell phones were near the crime.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
So if it was December 2013 when the feds came a knocking would Google still have the information? I know it's less than 2 years at this point, but now I'm wondering just how long data are held, not how long data is "required" to be held, but how long it is actually held, not like Google is short of storage.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
When you see people debating law using terms "IIRC" or "As far as I know" then you can safely ignore them.
I see a lot of that here.
Go read your rights here: https://www.eff.org/wp/know-your-rights
Encryption keys: Plead the 5th, if it applies you don't have to turn keys over, so if he had encrypted his email....
Don't use public mail, control your data, ESPECIALLY if you work somewhere like "wikileaks" (FFS that this has to be pointed out is really kinda dumb)
But the best protection of all, the absolute best fool proof protection... don't get involved and stay off the internet.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."