Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation
washingtonpost.com
Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation
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Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation
#2The reason for the gag orders: to keep the Federal Attorneys from getting a pile of bad publicity. This flies straight in the face of any kind of transparent government. If the Attorney's office gets a ton of criticism, then they're probably doing something extremely unpopular. It's good to do unpopular things in defense of minority opinions, given the USA's free speech tradition, but if the criticism is large in volume, and it stings, which apparently the twitter investigation criticism did, then the public outcry is correct. The Feds shouldn't be doing this stuff. I conclude that the gag orders are crap, and should be lifted. The Feds are doing stuff that might be legal, but is in a larger sense immoral.
Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation
#3Google was a premium partner in the Prysm NSA program. According to the first leaks, Google along with Facebook, Skype and Apple were the first to sign up to the NSA spying programs as partners.
All along they're trying to paint themselves as victims of the spying, which is ridiculous really...but I guess they can still fool a large population.
Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation
#4The reason for the gag orders: to keep the Federal Attorneys from getting a pile of bad publicity. This flies straight in the face of any kind of transparent government. If the Attorney's office gets a ton of criticism, then they're probably doing something extremely unpopular. It's good to do unpopular things in defense of minority opinions, given the USA's free speech tradition, but if the criticism is large in vol…
Seems like the gag orders are "don't tell these suspects that we're monitoring them". Seems quite legitimate and essential in ordinary cases. But we need a robust court system that will restrict gag orders to legit things, rather than suppressing dissent.
Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation
#5The reason for the gag orders: to keep the Federal Attorneys from getting a pile of bad publicity. This flies straight in the face of any kind of transparent government. If the Attorney's office gets a ton of criticism, then they're probably doing something extremely unpopular. It's good to do unpopular things in defense of minority opinions, given the USA's free speech tradition, but if the criticism is large in vol…
Seems like the gag orders are "don't tell these suspects that we're monitoring them". Seems quite legitimate and essential in ordinary cases. But we need a robust court system that will restrict gag orders to legit things, rather than suppressing dissent.
Yet the Federal prosecutors were ok letting Twitter inform and, according to the article, they didn't change their mind until the public backlash.
Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation
#6The reason for the gag orders: to keep the Federal Attorneys from getting a pile of bad publicity. This flies straight in the face of any kind of transparent government. If the Attorney's office gets a ton of criticism, then they're probably doing something extremely unpopular. It's good to do unpopular things in defense of minority opinions, given the USA's free speech tradition, but if the criticism is large in vol…
Seems like the gag orders are "don't tell these suspects that we're monitoring them". Seems quite legitimate and essential in ordinary cases. But we need a robust court system that will restrict gag orders to legit things, rather than suppressing dissent.
According to the text of the article, that's not true. The gag orders were to prevent the attorney from getting bad publicity. I suppose that they wrote "keep suspects in the dark" or the equivalent legalese in the motion, but the real reason appears to be otherwise.
Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation
#7(Any lawyers here who could weigh in?)
Could a company nullify gag orders if it was their policy to post ALL their correspondence on their website? For example, AcmeCo gets a request from the US Government to share information about one of AcmeCo's customers (e.g. WikiLeaks). AcmeCo scans and posts this letter (as it does for everything it receives including its electricity bill) on its website. Could they then circumvent the gag order this way? What would happen to AcmeCo?
Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation
#8Google was a premium partner in the Prysm NSA program. According to the first leaks, Google along with Facebook, Skype and Apple were the first to sign up to the NSA spying programs as partners. All along they're trying to paint themselves as victims of the spying, which is ridiculous really...but I guess they can still fool a large population.
The NSA was also wiretapping the connections between Google's datacenters, so they were victims of the NSA too.
(Until we know more about their relationship with the NSA, I also don't condemn them for the PRISM allegations.)
Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation
#9(Any lawyers here who could weigh in?) Could a company nullify gag orders if it was their policy to post ALL their correspondence on their website? For example, AcmeCo gets a request from the US Government to share information about one of AcmeCo's customers (e.g. WikiLeaks). AcmeCo scans and posts this letter (as it does for everything it receives including its electricity bill) on its website. Could they then circu…
"Could a company nullify gag orders if it was their policy to post ALL their correspondence on their website?"
Not a US-based company, because we have these nefarious things called National Security Letters. The penalty for knowingly breaking the gag order with the intent to interfere with an investigation is up to five years in prison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
Do you know any business owners willing to go to prison for five years for one of their users?
Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation
#10 > But the case represents “an amazing Catch-22,” he said.
> Google doesn’t “have the strongest right to challenge the
> scope or the reasonableness of the warrant. The only people
> who really have that are the targets of the warrant, and
> they don’t know about it. So essentially the government has
> carte blanche to get whatever they want.”
Not informing the target would restrict his ability to defend himself.
In a similar note, why even involve Google at all. Why not require the target to hand the information.
Maybe the fact that the targets are in different countries a problem to this approach.