US Government Seizes Email of WikiLeaks Volunteer 217
bs0d3 writes "The U.S. Department of Justice has forced Gmail and Sonic.net to hand over the personal information of Jacob Appelbaum, a WikiLeaks volunteer. Sonic says they fought to keep the DoJ out of Appelbaum's records, which was very expensive but 'the right thing to do.' Google said, 'we comply with the law,' although 'Both Google and Sonic pressed for the right to inform Mr. Appelbaum of the secret court orders, according to people familiar with the investigation.' The collected information and the nature of the investigation remain classified. Applebaum's Gmail correspondence seized by the DoJ dates back to November 1, 2009, which is believed to be the month that WikiLeaks contributor and Army Private Bradley Manning allegedly began communication with Julian Assange. Last year, federal prosecutors used a similar subpoena to obtain information pertaining to Applebaum's Twitter account."
Technical solutions don't matter! cDc and TOR! (Score:3, Informative)
I see a lot of talk about technical solutions, not using free email, et cetera. If you think things through, you will see that none of that matters at all. Firstly, it's a safe bet that someone in the US Government not hampered by even the pretense of following the law already had all Jacob's official correspondence, encrypted or not. As I've posted multiple times already (see my previous posts), AUSCANNZUKUS has had access to a production quantum computer system capable of cracking PKI for many years, running as a virtual quantum machine on a winner-take-all style recurrent topological quantum neural network based on a physical system composed of non-abelian anyons (e.g. solitons) in a two-dimensional electron gas (e.g. in a HEMT, now present in most computers). For insight into this little-known factoid, digest this [nobelprize.org] published [wikipedia.org] research [arxiv.org]. Presumably, someone tipped off DOJ that there was something in Jacob's correspondence worth looking at. For those of you not yet willing to believe that PKI was cracked long ago, it's also rather trivial to inject a key logger onto most anyone's system, which is just as good as cracking PKI and ALSO defeats synchronous shared-secret cryptography. Personally, I'm disinclined to believe in such things, but I saw indirect evidence of it and figured out (after years of monomaniacal research) exactly what it must be and how it must work. Email me for details, or wait for the book.
Second, to the silly posters who wish to teach Jacob security fundamentals, you should be aware that he MAINTAINS THE TOR PROJECT, and is a member of the cDc. He certainly knows more than you or I about security fundamentals, and I've been a CISSP for years, wrote banking software, and was a security lead for Symantec. Do you really think that the MAINTAINER OF THE TOR PROJECT does not know how to become anonymous online? Hacktivismo is a spin-off of the cDc, and Wikileaks is a Hacktivismo project. That detail still has not been in the media, as far as I can tell, but it is obvious to anyone who looks into the topic, and is certainly known to three-letter agencies. Just google for "disruptive compliance" and their mission statement floats right to the top (this is a Google hack, from the people who wrote Goolag). Consider Wikileaks, and then answer this question posed by that document in 2003 (the year the Wikileaks project began), "But what disruptively compliant, hacktivist applications shall we write?"
Third, in case this hasn't been pointed out before, Wikileaks did not break any laws. If they had, you can bet the US DOJ would have ALREADY charged someone with something, rather than trumping up a sex offense at just the right time. FYI, the Swedish attorney who charged Julian Assange with a sex offense is the SAME Swedish attorney who represented the CIA for the Extraordinary Rendition [wikipedia.org] trials, which makes him a CIA asset by definition. What Jacob Applebaum did was travel to Iceland and meet with other Wikileaks people for a few weeks. It's safe to say there was online correspondence, too. It's also safe to say, unless someone was downright stupid, that any truly sensitive communication was done anonymously. The ENTIRE POINT of Wikileaks was to set up the document submission policy to keep submitters anonymous, to make it IMPOSSIBLE to pressure the Wikileaks journalists into revealing sources (as governments have done to so many journalists recently). You can't tell what you don't know! If a source (e.g. Private Manning) is foolish enough to REVEAL THEMSELF then they are going to get in trouble. Even then, one can make a VERY STRONG argument that the documents he leaked (assuming he did it) reveal WAR CRIMES, in which case he was morally AND LEGALLY required to leak them, given that the usual chain of command was CLEARLY n
Re:Damn you George Bush!!!! (Score:2, Informative)
Man, the Demoplican party must have a huge cache of mod points because anything that points out the truth about Obama gets modded down.
Glen Greenwald had a great piece yesterday on how people who once vehemently attacked Bush for secret legal memos (*) and civil liberties violations, are doing the same things they decried with secret memos and worse civil liberties violations now that they are part of Obama's presidency. Civil liberties would have been safer with a Republocrat in office because then the Demoplicans could have gone on pretending to care about liberty.
http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/09/the_awlaki_memo_and_marty_lederman/singleton/ [salon.com]
(*) the law is designed to open source, readable by all so that it can be followed. Just how the fuck do you follow secret laws?
Re:The problem is the law (Score:5, Informative)
2011 US House reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act (HR 514):
Republicans:
Yea - 210
Nay - 26
No vote - 5
Democrats:
Yea - 67
Nay - 122
No vote - 4
In 2011, 35% of Democrats voted to reauthorize the PATRIOT ACT and 87% of Republicans do. The sooner you stop thinking that there are no differences between the parties, the sooner you can realize that your vote actually does make a difference.
I know that it's popular to trumpet the 'there is no difference' line on Slashdot. But instead of doing that, why not do some actual research into the positions and voting records of your candidates? Maybe then you will figure out that there *are* real differences and that the reality of a complex representative political system means that you are going to disagree with your representatives on a good number of issues.