Secret US Court Order demands email data for WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum

Secret US Court Order demands email data for WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum.

-- Tom

 

Has anyone ever challenged something like this and won? I know Google has challenged the governments requests multiple times in the past but they've always lost and it seems everyone else does as well.

It's a bit silly that the government asks for something and then the courts (government) get to decide whether they're allowed to or not.

 

More info:

Google Hands Wikileaks Volunteer's Gmail Data to U.S. Government - Read Write Web

 

Not sure what hefty dose of reality is gmail specific. This is a reminder to everyone that the government can basically do whatever it wants and no single company can fight it.

 

Goverment are like Gods or what?

 

There are governments, and there are cabals of engineers, mathematicians and military that handle SIGINT. Traditionally, SIGINT is only formally part of government. Government officials and staff are customers, and they are also targets. It's rather like geeks versus suits.

 

You have no idea how right you actually are. By the way, the courts issue: Stack the courts, namely the Supreme Court, with your allies, and you can practically do anything you damn well please. That's not a political comment, that's simply a fact of political life, standard procedure. Just look at the individual states for proof. Every single time they decide to enforce laws, the Federal government sues without so much as blinking first.

As to this secret law business, they've always existed. Long before the Patriot Act, long before we found out the NSA had a cubby hole in an AT&T building, these loopholes and "emergency" laws have been in the books. That law in 1986 was one of the launchpads for the erosion of rights and privacy. Funny how the Electronic "Privacy" Act let's the government get any data from an ISP they please and no one can say a word about it.

I'm sure some people are praising lawmakers for finally "realizing" the problems of privacy and security on the web...too bad it's all a sham. Have folks not noticed that every one of these so called "wins" we get in the form of new laws, are chock full of holes and exceptions? There's a reason for that. There's also a reason why a 1986 law (and others) regarding electronic communications lies unchanged from a time when the full blown web didn't even exist.

 

But didn't that law initially have to be for an emergency? And I thought I had read that, in an emergency they could demand information. But they had to submit some kind of probable cause after the fact within a certain period of time to a judge.....or something like that.

 

Read James Bamford's The Puzzle Palace.

 

You and I define emergency much different than the government as a whole. There are plenty of "emergency laws" on the books, however, they are used quite frequently. If you read many of them, you'll start noticing the exceptions sprinkled throughout. If you only get told what the laws are, or skim through the "legalese", you'll get bitten on the nose by the glaring loopholes put in place. It's no conspiracy that Darpa and numerous other agencies saw the World Wide Web coming. They were very well aware of what could be, and, frankly, what they wanted to be.

Of course with all new technologies and their use, there have to be protections in place (not for you and me, for the military, intelligence and LEA communities and the government as a whole.) They were quite well aware that if they could use it for their own purposes, so could their enemies. Think about it, 1986, no real net, no viruses, no cyber warfare just yet, little to no hacking. Why would they need to demand information from an ISP or any electronic data without a warrant?

They knew what was coming down the pipeline. The internet as we know it was something only in our wildest dreams, not Darpa's. Darpa thrives on wild dreams. These are people that will plan out and start on projects that might take a century to even have the materials available. I'm meandering off on a tangent, but my point is that governments plan much further ahead than we do, and they make absolutely certain that they, at the end of the day, can overrule anyone at anytime, and maintain their power.

 

According to the Wired Article Below they were using different laws than others have cited:

DoJ’s WikiLeaks Probe Widens to Include Gmail, ISP - Wired

So they were not after the content but the contact information?

Even still it appears they are required to provide some type of specific facts before information is allowed to be released. Maybe “specific and articulable facts” is defined as some legally loose meaning that just sounds impressive to non-lawyers.

All the more reason to VPN to Cryptocat and Encrypt everything else now. :sigh:

 

This is the sole reason I use PGP for ALL e-mails.