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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
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
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!
Colocate a server that's using whole disk encryption? Although they would probably just compel you to give up the key, although I seem to recall the EFF was arguing that should be covered under the 5th amendment.
this is my sig
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.
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...
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
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
Did you think Google deletes email you download?
In England they've already got that covered with the RIPA - which IIRC requires you to give up passwords, and denies you any whistle blowing.
You may of missed the point that the DOJ didn't want the guy to know they were reading his mail.
I think he might have guessed if they were pulling his fingernails out and screaming "what is your email password!"
Watch this Heartland Institute video
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.