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Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation

#31

Post by tedunangst »

bediger4000 wrote: post #6
lkbm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that a fact or an opinion? The "text of the article" that supports that conclusion is a quote from Googles attorney, not an unbiased source.

Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation

#32

Post by username223 »

> In the fall of 2011, Google was able to tell Appelbaum that the government had sought data such as the IP addresses of the people he e-mailed with,

Google needs to store your plaintext email so it can make money by showing you ads, but its data retention policies are both unnecessary and outrageous.

Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation

#33

Post by charonn0 »

datashovel wrote: post #13

IMO governments need to learn how to adapt to this new "information age". That's not to say they need to try to find new ways to suppress information. They need to allow public discourse to help them define their limitations.

I don't think they can. The information age is rendering national governments obsolete.

Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation

#34

Post by higherpurpose »

sarciszewski wrote: post #11
dudus wrote: post #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.” Shouldn't in cases like this the gag order go to the target of the warrant.…

"why even involve Google at all" "So essentially the government has carte blanche to get whatever they want" I think your quote answered your own question.

Yup. Going to the third party provider as if it owns your data is a complete bypass of the 4th amendment. To make an analogy it would be like the federal government having to serve a warrant/court order/gar order only to your local mayor to search your house without your permission.

Imagine how messed up that would be. Yet, it's exactly what happens in the digital world, and somehow we've learned to take it for granted. If it's your data, the warrant should be served to you. As for terms of service and such of online services that say once you upload your data to their cloud, then it becomes "theirs", that's complete bull, and such a thing should be made illegal.

Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation

#35

Post by Crito »

lkbm wrote: post #4
bediger4000 wrote: post #2

The 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.

Would people involved with Wikileaks actually change their behavior if they were given proof that the US government was spying on them? I assume they are already operating under the assumption that that is the case. From what I have seen, the US government spying on that community is already taken as established fact within that community.

Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation

#36

Post by declan »

dublinben wrote: post #16
sarciszewski wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 o…

How could you knowingly break a gag order, if an automated system publicly posts all correspondence before anyone reads them?

Because the correspondence comes:

(a) in the form of a valid court order hand-delivered to and served on your CEO at his home at 6am by two very grim federal agents who don't really like getting up this early, or

(b) if you're represented by counsel, it comes in the form of notification to your attorney by the court clerk that a court order has been issued (or perhaps notification from an AUSA if the clerk's office is slacking).

Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation

#37

Post by sarciszewski »

dublinben wrote: post #16
sarciszewski wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 o…

How could you knowingly break a gag order, if an automated system publicly posts all correspondence before anyone reads them?

The government can easily subvert the automated system (i.e. if you make legal@somedomain.com -> public record, they email your personal yahoo/gmail account which is not automatically posted).

OpSec notwithstanding. If the government doesn't know your other email addresses, this obviously doesn't apply.

If everything that comes to every one of your inboxes is immediately laid bare for the world to see, they cannot circumvent the process and also cannot prove that you knowingly and intentionally violated the gag order. I don't know anyone who does this, however.

Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation

#39

Post by sarciszewski »

Zigurd wrote: post #28
sarciszewski wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

The answer CAN be "all of the above." Just because the NSA went beyond any agreement they may have with Google, and Google is genuinely pissed off about that, doesn't mean Google (or any other major technology company in the US) hasn't cooperated with the government regarding surveillance. It is certain that telecom carriers participated willingly in the massive collection of telephone network CDRs from way back when…

I don't dispute that there was some collusion or collaboration, but at the same time, I don't condemn people on an incomplete pictures. Period.

For all we know, PRISM was more-or-less a euphemism for "we had a shallow collaboration that we used to pivot into a larger compromise of their networks".

Conversely, I'm going to have to agree with 'tptacek and his (probably not popular) opinion on Google and their influence on privacy and security at large.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8949256

So I stand by my decision to not condemn them until we learn more about the nature of their collaboration with the NSA's plot to deteriorate human rights the world over. Not because I love Google and think they can do no evil, but because I believe in charitable debate and skeptical inquiry.

Re: Google says it fought gag orders in WikiLeaks investigation

#40

Post by Zigurd »

sarciszewski wrote: post #39
Zigurd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer CAN be "all of the above." Just because the NSA went beyond any agreement they may have with Google, and Google is genuinely pissed off about that, doesn't mean Google (or any other major technology company in the US) hasn't cooperated with the government regarding surveillance. It is certain that telecom carriers participated willingly in the massive collection of telephone network CDRs from way back when…

I don't dispute that there was some collusion or collaboration, but at the same time, I don't condemn people on an incomplete pictures. Period. For all we know, PRISM was more-or-less a euphemism for "we had a shallow collaboration that we used to pivot into a larger compromise of their networks". Conversely, I'm going to have to agree with 'tptacek and his (probably not popular) opinion on Google and their influence…

> I believe in charitable debate and skeptical inquiry.

I believe in the odds. And the odds are that any technology that has a high potential to significantly add to surveillance capabilities has been exploited for that purpose either by hacking it or convincing (strong-arming if needed) the technology provider to cooperate.

I don't deny that Google does a lot of great things in general, and in security research specifically. That would be denying the plain facts. But I also do not think that has any impact at all on the relationships the government builds with (or forces upon) large corporations regarding national security.

When the chips are down, the NSA and other TLAs are going to get what they want. Now that tptacek is part of a larger transnational security company, he may find that out firsthand.

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