[governance] Secret Orders Target Email: WikiLeaks Backer's Information Sought

Mon Oct 10 04:05:43 EDT 2011

This is interesting.

I would much rather see Governments serve Orders rather than take the
information arbitrarily through the use of Trojans. I would rather see
processes for extraction of information rather than forced extractions.

Both are not good but which one would I rather settle for? Process and due
process

On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Riaz K Tayob <riaz.tayob at gmail.com> wrote:

> [affected party not party to the case?]
>
> <http://on.wsj.com/pWFyRw>
> OCTOBER 10, 2011
> Secret Orders Target Email
> WikiLeaks Backer's Information Sought
> By JULIA ANGWIN
> The U.S. government has obtained a controversial type of secret court
> order to force Google Inc. and small Internet provider Sonic.net Inc.
> to turn over information from the email accounts of WikiLeaks
> volunteer Jacob Appelbaum, according to documents reviewed by The Wall
> Street Journal.
> Sonic said it fought the government's order and lost, and was forced
> to turn over information. Challenging the order was "rather expensive,
> but we felt it was the right thing to do," said Sonic's chief
> executive, Dane Jasper. The government's request included the email
> addresses of people Mr. Appelbaum corresponded with the past two
> years, but not the full emails.
> Both Google and Sonic pressed for the right to inform Mr. Appelbaum of
> the secret court orders, according to people familiar with the
> investigation. Google declined to comment. Mr. Appelbaum, 28 years
> old, hasn't been charged with wrongdoing.
> The court clashes in the WikiLeaks case provide a rare public window
> into the growing debate over a federal law that lets the government
> secretly obtain information from people's email and cellphones without
> a search warrant. Several court decisions have questioned whether the
> law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, violates the U.S.
> Constitution's Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable
> searches and seizures.
> WikiLeaks is a publisher of documents that people can submit
> anonymously. After WikiLeaks released a trove of classified government
> diplomatic cables last year, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said
> the U.S. was pursuing an "active criminal investigation" of WikiLeaks.
> Passed in 1986, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act is older
> than the World Wide Web, which was dreamed up in 1989. A coalition of
> technology companies—including Google, Microsoft Corp. and AT&T
> Corp.—is lobbying Congress to update the law to require search
> warrants in more digital investigations.
> The law was designed to give the same protections to electronic
> communications that were already in place for phone calls and regular
> mail. But it didn't envision a time when cellphones transmitted
> locations and people stored important documents on remote services,
> such as Gmail, rather than on their own computers.
> Law enforcement uses the law to obtain some emails, cellphone-location
> records and other digital documents without getting a search warrant
> or showing probable cause that a crime has been committed. Instead the
> law sets a lower bar: The government must show only "reasonable
> grounds" that the records would be "relevant and material" to an
> investigation.
> As a result, it can be easier for law-enforcement officers to see a
> person's email information than it is to see their postal mail.
> Another significant difference: A person whose email is inspected this
> way often never knows a search was conducted. That's because court
> orders under the 1986 law are almost always sealed, and the Internet
> provider is generally prohibited from notifying the customer whose
> data is searched. By contrast, search warrants are generally delivered
> to people whose property is being searched.
> The secrecy makes it difficult to determine how often such court
> orders are used. Anecdotal data suggest that digital searches are
> becoming common.
> In 2009, Google began disclosing the volume of requests for user data
> it received from the U.S. government. In the six months ending Dec.
> 31, Google said it received 4,601 requests and complied with 94% of
> them. The data include all types of requests, including search
> warrants, subpoenas and requests under the 1986 law.
> At a Senate hearing in April on whether the 1986 law needs updating,
> Associate Deputy Attorney General James A. Baker cautioned Congress
> "that raising the standard for obtaining information under ECPA may
> substantially slow criminal and national security investigations."
> In May, the ECPA's author, U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.), said the
> original law is "significantly outdated and outpaced by rapid changes
> in technology." He introduced a bill adopting many of the
> recommendations of the technology coalition lobbying for changes to
> the law.
> Some federal courts have questioned the law's constitutionality. In a
> landmark case in December, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth
> Circuit ruled that the government violated the Fourth Amendment when
> it obtained 27,000 emails without a search warrant.
> "The police may not storm the post office and intercept a letter, and
> they are likewise forbidden from using the phone system to make a
> clandestine recording of a telephone call—unless they get a warrant,"
> Judge Danny Boggs wrote in the 98-page opinion. "It only stands to
> reason that, if government agents compel an [Internet service
> provider] to surrender the contents of a subscriber's emails, those
> agents have thereby conducted a Fourth Amendment search."
> In August, the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of New York
> over-ruled a government request to obtain cellphone location records
> without a warrant, calling it "Orwellian." Judge Nicholas Garaufis
> wrote: "It is time that the courts begin to address whether
> revolutionary changes in technology require changes to existing Fourth
> Amendment doctrine." The government has appealed.
> The WikiLeaks case became a test bed for the law's interpretation
> earlier this year when Twitter fought a court order to turn over
> records from the accounts of WikiLeaks supporters including Mr.
> Appelbaum.
> Mr. Applebaum is a developer for the Tor Project Inc., a Walpole,
> Mass., nonprofit that provides free tools that help people maintain
> their anonymity online. Tor's tools are often used by people living in
> countries where Internet traffic is monitored by the government. Tor
> obtains some of its funding from the U.S. government.
> Mr. Appelbaum has also volunteered for WikiLeaks, which recommends
> people use Tor's tools to protect their identities when submitting
> documents to its website. In April 2010, Mr. Appelbaum's involvement
> in WikiLeaks was inadvertently disclosed publicly in a blog post on
> the website of the Committee to Protect Journalists. The reporter,
> Danny O'Brien, said Mr. Appelbaum had thought he was speaking
> anonymously. Mr. O'Brien said he later offered to remove Mr.
> Appelbaum's name from the post.
> After the blog post appeared, Mr. Appelbaum became a public advocate
> for WikiLeaks. In June, he gave a speech at a Northern California
> technology camp where he called WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange one
> of the "biggest inspirations in my life."
> On Dec. 14, the U.S. Department of Justice obtained a court order for
> information from the Twitter account of people including Mr. Appelbaum
> and WikiLeaks supporters Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of the
> Icelandic parliament, and Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch computer programmer.
> Neither has been charged with wrongdoing.
> The order sought the "Internet protocol," or IP, addresses of the
> devices from which people logged into their accounts. An IP address is
> a unique number assigned to a device connected to the Internet.
> The order also sought the email addresses of the people with whom
> those accounts communicated. The order was filed under seal, but
> Twitter successfully won from the court the right to notify the
> subscribers whose information was sought.
> On Jan. 26, attorneys for Mr. Appelbaum, Mr. Gonggrijp and Ms.
> Jonsdottir jointly filed a motion to vacate the court order. They
> argued, among other things, that because IP addresses can be used to
> locate a person in "specific geographic destinations," it constituted
> a search under the Fourth Amendment and thus required a warrant.
> The government argued that IP addresses don't reveal precise location
> and are more akin to phone numbers. At a Feb. 15 hearing, Assistant
> U.S. Attorney John S. Davis said, "this is a standard… investigative
> measure that is used in criminal investigations every day of the year
> all over this country."
> On March 11, U.S. Magistrate Judge Theresa Carroll Buchanan denied the
> WikiLeaks supporters' motion. They have appealed.
> Twitter hasn't turned over information from the accounts of Mr.
> Appelbaum, Ms. Jonsdottir and Mr. Gonggrijp, according to people
> familiar with the investigation.
> The court orders reviewed by the Journal seek the same type of
> information that Twitter was asked to turn over. The secret Google
> order is dated Jan. 4 and directs the search giant to hand over the IP
> address from which Mr. Appelbaum logged into his gmail.com account and
> the email and IP addresses of the users with whom he communicated
> dating back to Nov. 1, 2009. It isn't clear whether Google fought the
> order or turned over documents.
> The secret Sonic order is dated April 15 and directs Sonic to turn
> over the same type of information from Mr. Appelbaum's email account
> dating back to Nov. 1, 2009.
> On Aug. 31, the court agreed to lift the seal on the Sonic order to
> provide Mr. Appelbaum a copy of it. Sonic Chief Executive Mr. Jasper
> said the company also sought to unseal the rest of its legal filings
> but that request "came back virtually entirely denied."
> --
>
>
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-- 
Salanieta Tamanikaiwaimaro aka Sala

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