Slashdot Mirror
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?
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?
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.
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.
They pretend it's about the Swedish "rape" case, by which I mean consenting sex without a condom.
Sigh. First off, it's just as easy to extradite someone to the US from the UK as it is from Sweden. If the US wants him, there's no need for them to somehow persuade the Swedish authorities to extradite him first on their behalf.
Second, sex without consent is rape. If someone agrees to have sex with you on condition that you use a condom, then they haven't consented to condom-less sex. And condom-less sex with a promiscuous stranger risks such nasties as HIV. Whether this happened, we don't know. But the Swedish authorities have the right to carry out an investigation.
Overall, my feeling is that WikiLeaks is an important public service, but that Julian Assange is a bit of an arsehole.
You realise that on all of the counts listed in the European Arrest Warrant, dual criminality was asserted and thus no UK judge found grounds to dismiss on the basis of lack of criminality in the offences listed?
See page 15 of the following PDF:
http://webarchive.nationalarch...
And you should also check out what the offences listed actually are, because your description is quite a way off.
The offence described as rape is as follows:
[quote]
On 17 August 2010, in the home of the injured party (SQ) in Enkoping, Assange deliberately consummated sexual intercourse with her by improperly exploiting that she, due to sleep, was in a helpless state.
It is an aggravating circumstance that Assange, who was aware that it was the expressed wish of the injured party and a prerequisite of sexual intercourse that a condom be used, still consummated unprotected sexual intercourse with her. The sexual act was designed to violate the injured party's sexual integrity.
[/quote]
Offence 4, Page 3 of the above document.
The lack of a condom used also shows up in Offence 2, Page 2, for a different injured party (AA).
How about you Assange supporters actually get your facts right about what the arrest warrant actually lays out? You can harp on about "such silly charges" but its patently obvious you have never actually read the rulings against Assange, which makes it trivial to dismiss you out of hand.
First off, it's just as easy to extradite someone to the US from the UK as it is from Sweden.
Sweden has helpfully allowed the US to extradite two people without going through the usual legal procedures. That is to say, they didn't debate the matter in court: they just grabbed them off the street, bundled them into an airplane and flew them out of the country within a few hours. The only reason their lawyer even knew this was happening is because he was in the middle of a phone conversation with one of them when he was grabbed. The two of them were flown to Egypt, where they were tortured. (Or, just possibly, were treated with perfect humaneness by the Egyptian government, and concocted an elaborate lie about being tortured. And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.)
To my knowledge, there is no similar case of anyone being abducted from the UK with the consent of the UK government. If I had earned the enmity of the US, I'd feel much safer in the UK than in Sweden.
Triggered...triggered? Dont use that bullshit social justice lingo. You weren't triggered you dont have PTSD. At best you were annoyed
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.
The fear wasn't extradition, it was rendition. People had been kidnapped from Sweden before. Sweden even had to run its own military ops to stop it happening. The problem is that parts of the government still seem to be cooperating with the US. The crackdown in TPB appears to have been at the request of the US.
It also seems highly suspicious that the case was dropped and he was told he was free to go, but then the prosecutor changed her mind and refused to interview him in the UK. If you were wanted by the US, if US senators were literally calling for your head on a platter, would you take the risk of going there? If you had seen leaked evidence that they do in fact render people to other countries, torture them for months, take them Guantanamo and torture them some more?
By all means lets have an investigation. The Swedish authorities want to question him. They can do that in the UK, or by video link. He offered, repeatedly, and it's been done before. Then they can decide what they want to do next, and we can hear some charges and legal arguments.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.