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Google Handed To FBI 3 Wikileaks Staffers' Emails, Digital Data
Ariastis writes Google took almost three years to disclose to the open information group WikiLeaks that it had handed over emails and other digital data belonging to three of its staffers to the FBI under a secret search warrant issued by a federal judge. WikiLeaks were told last month of warrants which were served in March 2012. The subjects of the warrants were the investigations editor of WikiLeaks, the British citizen Sarah Harrison; the spokesperson for the organisation, Kristinn Hrafnsson; and Joseph Farrell, one of its senior editors. When it notified the WikiLeaks employees last month, Google said it had been unable to say anything about the warrants earlier as a gag order had been imposed.
If I worked for Wikileaks, I think I'd be encrypting everything especially if it involved using a Google server.
"We have a 'secret' warrant. Give us what we want or YOU goto jail."
Damm google for not protecting users... It's all their fault!
Google had no choice under US law. If you want to bash something, bash the US govt. Out of all the big names in tech, Google is still the least evil.
See that Android phone in front of you, the one you say 'OK Google' to? the one with the camera and the face-unlock feature? Google owns your life, and if secret warrants can get Google to turn over data it has on you, then that device in front of you is nothing but a surveillance device.
How many cameras and microphones do you have in the room right now?
They pretend it's about the Swedish "rape" case, by which I mean consenting sex without a condom, for the Wikileaks founder. They hound him for YEARS on such silly charges, pretending that no, it's all very serious and no, they're not interested in extraditing him to the US to be tortured and broken.
And then the other shoe drops. And who is surprised.
At last check it is Microsoft who is fighting these sorts of things... even when significant penalties could be involved if they fail: http://www.zdnet.com/article/m...
Where is Google's backbone?
You can't fix bad government policy with better tech...
Can you tell the difference between foreign data and data stored in the US?
The software giant has been battling U.S. prosecutors for data held in its Dublin, Ireland datacenter, which it says cannot be accessed or retrieved by a U.S. search warrant.
If the data is held in the US the Us warrant has jurisdiction and the Microsoft battle does not apply.
The residence of the person is irrelevant. The issue is the location of the data. If the data is stored on US servers then the warrant applies.
Privacy issues aside, continued revelations like this ultimately damages US data businesses. They ("they") don't give a shit about a lot of things but usually they care about promoting and preserving US business opportunities. Why would Europe or anyone else subscribe to a US company's data offerings now? Or US citizens for that matter?
"He's using a quantum encryption scheme! That'll take hours to break!"
Where is Google's backbone?
I dunno, like 2013... http://www.wired.com/2013/01/google-says-get-a-warrant/
I mean, when Yahoo started demanding warrants everyone noted that it was "what Google was already doing" http://www.wired.com/2013/01/yahoo-demands-warrants/
So, Google has already been demanding search warrants for a very long time, and that's exactly what the FBI had!
Sure you can. It's called PGP, or GPG if you want the name of the best implementation rather than the protocol, and Wikileaks was incompetent if it wasn't using it in 2012.
"Well they can outlaw PGP"...maybe, but they haven't, and US courts may very well look unkindly on such laws and find them unconstitutional.
Better tech is often an integral part of fixing bad government policy in an imperfect world.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Does cherry picking old war stories usually work out well for you?
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Legality of tax evasion schemes is flaky, moreso - it's quite hard to nail corporations for it, because they follow the letter of the law and game the system in order to minimize their taxes. Now telling FBI off and refusing to comply with a court order is entirely different game - penalties can range up to total halt of all services google provides on US soil and confiscation of every tangible item feds can get their hands on. You want change - go whine at government for insilling the rules not at corporations playing by them.
Talk to Microsoft about that.
No need. Microsoft and the GP agree that it does matter where the data is STORED.
Fuck man, stop giving us this shitty excuse!
Under US laws Google has to pay *A SHITLOAD OF TAXES* and what Google did?
Google shifted its money, via accounting, around the world, to Ireland, to Luxembourg, to many other tax havens, so that it doesn't need to pay those taxes
No. Obviously Google hasn't to pay a "shitload of taxes" as US (and other countries) laws allowed them to legally shift their money around the world.
You're mixing that up with "should have to pay"
bickerdyke
You mean they were just following orders?
Foreign dependencies because multinational companies wnat to make business in those countries, too. Most countries demand that a part of your company is in that country if you want to sell something there. (Or at least a local distributor who is responsible for what is imported and sold)
It's tax reasons why those companies exist in Ireland, and not in France or Germany.
bickerdyke
ixquick.com
yandex.com
torproject.org
In which case the non-US citizens should be glad that the US authorities even went that extra mile and got a judge to sign a warrant and not NSL to get the data of foreign agents without judical oversight.
bickerdyke
When the data is there, that means that it is not just a shell corps. That means they actually have a datacenter there.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
If the data was in the US, not so much. The fact that the data was ALSO on non-US servers would not matter.
I could imagine that Google has a LOT of duplicate information around the world, so that it can serve the customer as fast as possible. Just like Amazon has several warehouses and not just one.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Isn't the most smartest thing to do to setup your own mail server especially for an organization such as this one?
Same could be said for cloud storage and anything else in-between. Why store any of your stuff with any of these people when they easily fork over your data to the government.
The subjects of the warrants were the investigations editor of WikiLeaks, the British citizen Sarah Harrison; the spokesperson for the organisation, Kristinn Hrafnsson; and Joseph Farrell, one of its senior editors
It's obvious they also stole some vowels from the poor spokesperson.
#DeleteChrome
You can't fix bad government policy with better tech...
But Microsoft is using the opposite tactic and fighting this with bad tech. If the government are spending all their money on licenses and all their efforts trying to integrate proprietary systems then they have less time and resources to snoop on citizens
Everybody shits.
Except for Kim Jong Un
Do you have any proof that FBI have asked to have data that is stored in servers in other countries like the ms-case and google then provided it to the FBI?, seems more like you are just grasping for straws to bash google
And this got me thinking, how can they outlaw strong encryption anyway?
If I send you a file which contains random garbage, how is that different from a file/text encrypted? I don't think there is a way for them to prove that you were using encryption beyond reasonable doubt.
All of this trying to outlaw strong encryption completely pointless.
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
Well there is clearly a conspiracy against Wikileaks, because these 3 staffers had their emails spied on, or are you suggesting they also had sex with this woman while she was asleep? She seems to be a really heavy sleeper!
The 'sheer effort' claim is also bogus. He WAS IN SWEDEN, he even asked if it was OK to go to the UK. No extradition warrant was needed, they could simply have laid charges before he left or after his return.
The only reason to wait for issue the warrant appears to be for the "fugitive" claim it bestows.
Triggered...triggered? Dont use that bullshit social justice lingo. You weren't triggered you dont have PTSD. At best you were annoyed
PGP or GPG is not a full solution. It's currently difficult enough to setup and annoying enough to use that only a tiny portion of the population will ever bother. The NSA can't watch everyone. But as long as GPG is in use by less than 0.1% of the population and of course PGP doesn't obscure senders, recipients, or even message size (though you can pad message size if you choose), the NSA can watch people who use it.
Likewise Tor isn't a solution it's integral to the HTTP 3.0 protocol.
We need to create better tools.
Dammit, I meant "Likewise Tor isn't a solution until it's integral to the HTTP 3.0 protocol."
>court-issued warrant
>gag order
Do tell, what would you have done in their situation? Told the courts to go stuff themselves? Cause that almost never goes well.
You mean they were just following orders?
They responded to a search warrant. The only thing that makes this search warrant different from other search warrants is that for some reason you think that emails of the accused person shouldn't be searched in this case. Your justification seems to be purely political. I don't think Google should fight specific search warrants on purely political reasons, Google itself might not have your political views and might not want to fight these search warrants at all, and last Google doesn't actually have any standing to fight these warrants. If there is something wrong with the search warrants, someone's lawyers will bring it up in court.
Ahh yes a classic internet toughguy. When was the last time you were served a US federal warrant by a US judge to hand over data stored by a US company in the US about a customer who doesn't pay you anything at all, and then decide to "fight it".
I'm guessing never since we don't get many brave slashdot ACs posting from prison.
They were using PGP for internal emails, but couldn't when interacting with people outside the organization who didn't use it. There is also the metadata, which is at least as valuable as the content.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
PGP/GPG is much easier to use these days than it was in the 90's. Plugins exist for many mail clients that do the heavy lifting in the background.
Friends and family are surely tired of my tinfoil hat, they just do not seem to care about their privacy. Many say the "I have nothing to hide" line.
Trolling is a art,
Did I miss something? Did they skip FBI 2 just like Windows 9? That headline could be written in a less confusing manner: "Google Handed Three Wikileaks Staffers' Data to FBI"
This is a perfect example of why cloud computing is a baaaaad idea...
At least when you have it in-house, the gov usually needs a warrant to come through your door and seize stuff....At the very least you are aware you are being targeted and can start mounting a legal defense.
When it's housed on a 3rd party provider, you need not even be aware they have seized your stuff.....
Not to mention corporate espionage going on and you have exactly 0 ways of detecting it.
Yes yes you can encrypt. But encryption does not work for EVERYTHING in every situation. You can encrypt documents easy enough, but what if those documents are only available via a web interface (something like good docs). Or how do you encrypt say virtual servers so the host (who has root access to the hardware) cannot see them or what is inside them but their hypervisor can execute it....
Funny enough phone service suffers from the same problems. Your service provider knows who you are calling, when, from where and can listen in to your convo at will without you knowing any better. But this is why, pre-911, you needed a warrant to do that and there where legal protections in place to prevent that from occurring.
I thought the Supreme Court ruled a long time ago Americans had a right to encrypt by way of free speech.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Friends and family are surely tired of my tinfoil hat, they just do not seem to care about their privacy. Many say the "I have nothing to hide" line.
Many are idiots. And the tin-foil hat line seems passe now that it's been proven that quite likely even the most paranoid tin-foil hat wearer underestimated the true scope of the surveillance operations.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Complying with a federally issued, legal warrant isn't evil.
Google has no requirement to spend thousands, or even millions of dollars to fight, (especially a losing fight), a warrant on anybody's behalf.
The "I have nothing to hide" line frustrates me too.
The twitter-friendly response is, "Just because I have nothing to hide, it doesn't mean I'm happy with a webcam on my toilet."
The longer response is that the NSA is asking Google to record all of my searches, Comcast to record every website I visit at home, Verizon to record every place my cell phone goes and every cell phone call I make, and Voipo (my home phone service, similar to Vonage) to record the phone number on every home call I make. Even if I was comfortable with the government possessing that information without probable cause, it means a crooked law enforcement official, a disgruntled employee, or a criminal hacker can get a scary amount of private data about me from any one of those five sources and use it to stalk me or commit identity theft. If I am the only person with all of that data then the stalkers, the identity thieves, and the government have to hack my personal machines to get it.
Google = Government. Have you not read "When Google Met Wikileaks" by Assange?
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
And the lesson is if you care about privacy you should avoid storing your data with multinational companies because every nation in which the company operates is a nation that could potentially coerce the company into handing over your data..
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
So, you must know so much more about the federal warrant that Google was legally obliged to respond to. Where is all that pesky evidence that the judge did something wrong?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
You want change - go whine at government for insilling the rules not at corporations playing by them.
You say that as if though there's actually a distinction between the 'government' making rules and the poor 'corporationd' forced to abide by them.
Essentially none of my friends and family have GPG enabled, and most don't know what it is. I can't communicate securely unless the person at the other end cooperates.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Triggered...triggered? Dont use that bullshit social justice lingo. You weren't triggered you dont have PTSD. At best you were annoyed
Ran out of mod points, or I'd give you some :) Posting instead:
Always call people on this kind of shit. So many people trying to avoid responsibility for what they say or do these days.... and he was already posting as AC to begin with.....
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
How much security he has on his personal machine is secondary.
Hackers/government/whoever will target the big databases with everyone's information in them. That is worth their time. If your information is in there, you suffer also.
Hackers/government/whoever are far far far less likely to be hacking your personal computer, unless you've managed to get flagged already, and become a target through some other means, which sure can happen, but the point is, you don't need to be targeted to have your identity stolen if your identity information is being logged and stored by multiple other systems.
Simply not having/being in those big databases is better than any personal firewall imho.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
Bullshit.
When smaller entities try the same practices in Australia, the Australian Tax Office comes down hard and says the offshore entity is not genuine, but a method of evading tax.
However they do nothing when large conglomerates setup "offices" in tax havens.
Yeah, and that is exactly how they get around disingenuous offshore entities... by putting an office out there with at least 1 employee in it. Then it's legitimate. All the larger companies save far more than it costs to set this up when they do so. Smaller companies cannot offset the cost. But that's purely based on the amount of money your company makes. There's a point where you have to get some tax loopholes, as that's what most of your best competitors are doing, and you aren't going to want to compete with a handicap... But the solution is tax reform, and ianap (i am not a politician(thank goodness)) so getting waaay of topic here :)
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
They were complying with the request from their local government that was legally reasonable, and that they had no place to interfere with, which they are required (just like every other person/entity/company) to do in order to operate within their locality.....
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
No...... That's not Google's evil, that's the government's evil. When men in suits with the the power of the government behind them come to you legally requiring you to hand over a customers information, doing so doesn't make you evil. It makes you a law abiding citizen. And if they also legally prevent you from letting that customer know, that's their evil, not yours.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
I have read it. Google rep showed up with a (probably unwelcome) government shadow. Doesn't mean that Google == Government. If they did, we'd never hear about any of these goings on. Google (and many other companies, and individuals) are often required to comply with governmental directives, on a daily basis.
It seems like half the people posting here today believe that Google is giggling and sending private data to the government willy nilly, when the case is they were legally required to, have constantly pushed back where possible against this kind of request, actively help campaign for better consumer protection, and, as soon as they legally are allowed to, inform the public of what teh government is making or trying to make them do.
And as noted, it's not just Google, Microsoft also, in a big way, and many other companies of all sizes.
The common thread here isn't Google and it being evil. The common thread is the government.
btw, I'm not a Google fanboy, or an any company fanboy. I own machines running windows, osx and linux and android. I use chrome firefox and... well I only use others when I have to actually, but if you want to be calling out evil companies, there's some real actual targets like big pharma, tobacco, etc. Google is a veritable choirboy compared to them imho. As is MS and Apple too. They make profits by making life better for us, big tobacco, on the other hand....... All the evil that seems to come out of these big tech companies is pulled out legally by the government, almost always against the companies desires.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
In the US of A, it is 'pay to play' in government matters. Google out donated the military-industrialites for campaign financing. Google also provides computer infrastructure to the US military. Just because Microsoft plays too, does not make Google less culpable. The two sides (Google and Gov't) are in deep, 'synchronicity'.Just like the Bush, Cheney, Rice oil exec junta--Google is moving in as being part of that dark influence. Just like Microsoft, Google helps drones kill. Google may do some good things, but the bad cannot be ignored. We need not support Google, rather let us look to alternatives. I am not against government, but their policies need a deep re-examination and the people need to hold them accountable for their actions.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
Your justification seems to be purely political
The trouble is, the justification of the warrant seems to be purely political as well...
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Thank you. I agree with you.
If you start a company that is at the forefront of an industry, constantly pushing the envelope, and world recognised (and supported by userbase) and funded enough, you'll might find yourself dumping some money into politics as you're in a position to know how things should be shaped... That's not 'evil'. That's 'doing business and improving society (or attempting to).
You note that google provides infrastructure to the military. The military buy lots of stuff from IT infrastructure to weapons to vehicles to clothing to food to
And...
Google helps drones kill
OK. That's a fantastic one. let's cover a couple of quick things first: :)
Drones killing people == evil
Sure, it can be, but it might not be also. Unless you are of the belief that every killing is evil, in which case, you're gonna have to go down the rabbithole of lesser evils, because sometimes there's a person who is going to kill several other people, and killing them has to be considered as an alternative to killing x others. That's kind of the whole job of the military, making those kinds of decisions. You know, wars and stuff.
someone providing something that is used by someone else for killing
Well I kinda covered that earlier, but it should be pretty obvious who is responsible for the evil. Not like Google's going "Yeah, you can use our stuff in your drones, but only if you make sure and kill a bunch of innocent people with it"......
Oh I could go on, but who's going to bother reading this far
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
1) Campaign financing reform. There MUST be a campaign contribution limit. The current system stymies democracy. A corporation should not have more power than a citizen. Once you have (reasonable--the kind an average person can afford) caps, things will start getting fair. 2) Drones. Sure, if your family is targetted (and some killed) by these very drones and you STILL hold that position, then I will side with you.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
Oh, I'm all for more transparency, but I'm not politically minded enough to be sure my ideas are that great, however:
Just using the USA and Google for this example, the amount of money Google should be allowed to invest should be directly proportional to it's number of US Citizen employees.
I figure it'd be a good way to have the amount of sway a company can pull tied directly to their involvement (via employment) to the US economy in the political scene.
Yeah, no doubt it's flawed, however I wouldn't like to see a situation where no matter how much a company is giving to it's government, etc, it has an artificial capped limit.
As for if a drone kills someone I know, I'm going to be blaming the person who instigated it/directed it/pulled the (remote) trigger.
And if it wasn't any person, but some sort of accident, then I'll treat it like I would any other accident.
It's exactly the same as if a car killed someone I know. I'd blame the driver, not the guy who wrote the program that allowed the engine to fire efficiently enough to achieve the speed to achieve killing impact.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
The thought that always comes to me is "I have nothing to fear, so I have nothing to hide. If I have nothing to hide, why do you need to look?"
You are under estimating the literal tin-foil hat wearer, after all they believe government is reading thoughts right out of your brain.
Part A, so basically what you are saying is that you are not for democracy, but all for corporatocracy. Part B, Read this book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... Google knows full well that their systems are being used to kill off men, women, and children without due process. I will not support a company that knowingly assists crimes against humanity.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE