Google has handed information related to my account to the DoJ | Hacker News Reader

Google has handed information related to my account to the DoJ

twitter.com

"3 things: vocal & active supporter of WL & Assange for 10yrs, was in a twitter DM group that incl @wikileaks, visited assange several times at the embassy"

https://twitter.com/SomersetBean/status/1201620076383940610

So he is in fairly regular contact with an individual who was subject to an investigation? The system seems to work as intended. I would be worried if his account was not subpoenaed.

So, everyones private information is now globally accessible, and handing it out to anyone who asks is already normalized: "Working as intended."

Not everyone, just those who publicly associate with known criminals in the (very slow-motion) process of fleeing prosecution.

Is the known criminal Assange?

What has he been convicted of?

I don't know. I like Wikileaks. I'm not convinced Assange's so-called crimes are the reason he is being detained. This type of thread always seems to be crawling with spooklikes aggressively defending the state.

He plead guilty and was convicted for hacking Nortel in the 90s, and more recently was convicted and sentenced to ~a year in prison for jumping bail.

No one cares if you plea after you flee. People who are innocent don't usually flee the country. Same with Snowden and Russia to anyone who isn't drinking woke kool-aid still.

Snowden was trapped in Russia after his passport was cancelled en route to Latin America. In any case the US government doesn't like whistleblowers so i don't understand the big deal with running away.

You might be the one drinking the kool-aid if you think either one of them will get a fair trial.

Sounds like an easy way to dismiss any amount of evidence they're guilty by appealing to grand conspiracy.

And all the evidence against the government that is practically ignored? The thing about being a whistleblower is that the act of doing what is your “job” is illegal. Yes, what Snowden did was illegal, but that’s beside the point. We shouldn’t sit down and let the government screw us with bad laws.

> visited assange several times at the embassy

Talk about burying the lede.

No shit. Twitter user complaining about his data being subpoena by a court of law with due process in an active investigation.

In most dictatorships you would be dragged out of your house and shot because you didn’t like the same toothpaste as your “dear leader”. The author needs to get a clue. Go live in North Korea.

Explains everything.

Yeah, physically visiting a potential Russian asset _in_the_London_embassy_ will get you more scrutiny from the DoJ. I have zero sympathy for this person.

> visiting a potential Russian asset

That's unfair considering everybody is a potential asset to someone, whether the "good" or the "bad" guys.

Potential in this case is being used to indicate that there is significant evidence that he is a Russian asset, but that it has not been specifically proven. Not potential in 'well he has potential uses if he is an asset.'

Perhaps a more specific phrase would have been 'suspected Russian asset'

There is zero credible evidence that Assange is working with the Russian government. Please stop spreading propaganda.

Ecuador concluded that Assange was working with Russian intelligence, too.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/15/politics/assange-embassy-excl...

Despite being confined to the embassy while seeking safe passage to Ecuador, Assange met with Russians and world-class hackers at critical moments, frequently for hours at a time. He also acquired powerful new computing and network hardware to facilitate data transfers just weeks before WikiLeaks received hacked materials from Russian operatives.

Assange also met with Americans and got deliveries from Americans. Does that mean he's an asset for the CIA? There is equal evidence there. I don't understand how people make these giant leaps to conclusions one way but not another.

>Julian Assange received in-person deliveries, potentially of hacked materials related to the 2016 US election, during a series of suspicious meetings at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London

It could also be Chinese take-out. But CNN is going to speculate it's POTENTIALLY HACKED MATERIALS. Literally any delivery is potentially hacked materials. This is ridiculous.

Also, what makes meetings suspicious? There's no follow-up here, no substance. Why does CNN simply describe them as suspicious rather than provide evidence that suggests it might be?

Why is it a bombshell that he allegedly got hacked or leaked materials by courier? He clearly got them somehow, does it matter whether it was over email or in person? It's also possible it was a carrier pigeon - there's pigeons in the UK after all. And if he's getting materials from a courier, why does he need fancy hardware to get it digitally? This makes no sense.

There is absolutely nothing in this article other than speculation with a clear, logic-defying bias. And none of it is credible evidence Assange is working with the Russian government.

You're clearly dodging the points you're responding to. Ecuador also claims he worked with Russia. Do you have any links showing countries claiming the opposite?

Ecuador didn't claim anything. Ecuador paid a private firm based in Spain to spy on Assange and use that information as extortion[1][2]. Ecuador only said that the firm's report was "authentic" - in that whoever leaked it didn't fabricate it. That report is not public that I know of and so therefore the validity (or lack thereof) cannot really be confirmed. As far as I can tell, the report is mostly centered around who visited Assange, and CNN/others are making giant leaps that he talked to Russian journalists so therefore he's working with Russia, which is obviously very flawed logic.

Moreno (Ecuadorian President) used Assange as a political tool. He's created a smear campaign against Assange, claiming he smeared feces on the wall and attacked embassy guards, both of which have no evidence (which is especially relevant considering Assange was under 24/7 recorded surveillance). Moreno has also since labeled Assange a terrorist, which is absolutely ridiculous. And as it came out with this report, hired a security firm that illicitly spied on Assange and tried to exort him for millions of dollars. It is clear that whatever accusations come from Moreno are not substantiated or credible.

[1] https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/04/10/inenglish/1554906053_63... [2] https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/05/03/inenglish/1556898556_07...

I answer this more specifically downthread, but:

Repeated meetings with Russia's propaganda arm is fairly conclusive evidence, especially considering Assange would be under no false impressions about the legitimacy of RT as a news organization. By the nature of his job he would know exactly what RT is and choosing to repeatedly work with them is quite damning evidence.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/597pqn/mueller-assange-wo...

"While it’s not clear whether WikiLeaks participated in that now-infamous DNC hack, Mueller’s investigation revealed that WikiLeaks sought to spread conspiracies about where they got the information, obscure whether they knew it came from Russia, and release documents at times that seemingly benefited Trump by consuming the news cycle."

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

"The Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet RT (formerly Russia Today) has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks.RT’s editor-in-chief visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in August 2013, where they discussed renewing his broadcast contract with RT, according to Russian and Western media.Russian media subsequently announced that RT had become "the only Russian media company" to partner with WikiLeaks and had received access to "new leaks of secret information."RT routinely gives Assange sympathetic coverage and provides him a platform to denounce the United States."

You first link isn't worth anything. Wikileaks has never revealed sources, so to say they're "obscuring whether... it came from Russia" is ridiculous. He explicitly said it WASN'T Russia, I don't know how he could make it any clearer. Wikileaks has a 100% track record and there's no reason to doubt that statement. And of course evidence about HRC committing crimes benefits Trump, but that has nothing to do with Russia. I don't know why you've even included it.

Also - wow, a journalist meets with other journalists. How damning. Clearly he's a Russian asset. Maybe him being in contact with American news organizations also means he's an American asset and actually working for the CIA.

You are comparing a state run propaganda organization to independent news organizations. You simply cannot compare RT to CNN because RT is owned and funded by the Russian government. They have done some work to try and distance themselves from this idea, yet it's all quite surface level - even a Wikipedia level investigation of who is who at the senior leadership level will reveal more than enough ties to prove that the Russian government pulls the strings. As one example, Margarita Simonyan is the Editor in Chief of both RT and fully state-run Rossiya Segodnya (... which, "coincidentally", also translates in English as 'Russia Today').

3rd party media watchdog organizations such as Reporters Without Borders and Accuracy In Media consider RT as a propaganda arm of the Russian government as the results of their investigations into their reporting accuracy. Negative reporting of Putin is directly banned by RT.

They have a propensity for airing conspiracy theory based content as news, as well. They keep people like Tony Gosling on staff, an anti-semite who spends much of his time peddling conspiracy theories about a worldwide zionist illuminati, have run stories about how the boston bombing was perpetrated by the US government, how EU citizens have all been microchipped to release hormones that make them submissive, etc.

RT is not a legitimate news organization. They are an arm of the Russian government, and Assange would surely know exactly who and what they are. Working with them is incredibly damning evidence.

Personally, I don't believe that Assange was always a Russian asset. I think when he started WikiLeaks his intentions were relatively noble, at least in his eyes. But I think that the position he was put in over his actions ultimately gave the Russians significant leverage over him, and they were able to use that to flip him. But based on his recent actions, there is a significant body of evidence that he is a Russian asset. And to put it bluntly, your argument that RT is a legitimate news organization really only has 3 possible explanations that I can personally see: That you are informed on the subject and have taken a stance counter to independent media watchdogs/Western governments/etc. (Which may be fine, but I'm curious how you can rectify that view with all of the evidence that is publicly available), that you are uninformed on the subject and thus basing your defense of Assange on an incomplete understanding of the situation, or that you are informed but some bias in favor of Assange has you ignoring all of the evidence out there on RT.

By this standard a whole bunch of american libertarians, gold bugs, etc. are also russian assets, because they had a show on RT in the past. RT at the time just gave more voice to all kinds of pre-existing fringe voices in US to sow discord in US.

I mean, a lot of them probably are, or at least had overtures to flip them.

Giving an (at least semi-)hostile foreign government leverage over your is one of the very first steps in tradecraft to flipping someone and turning them into an asset. I feel like believing that there would be no effort on the part of the Russian government to turn these people into assets is fairly naive.

Nice, I see we're entering the new era of us surveillance. This guy was a public figure who associated with a party under investigation, he was not directly involved. In other words, a judge issued a gag order and a data handoff request on a private citizen to Google without probable cause. How could this be anything other than a fishing expedition?

>This guy was a public figure who associated with a party under investigation, he was not directly involved.

Martin Luther King Jr was just a preacher advocating peace and love for all man kind.

The FBI was tasked with surveilling King at the request of J Edgar Hoover in 1963 (a full 5 years before he was killed). [0] [1]

Powerful people are threatened by those who ignore their wills and feel compelled to stop those people by any means necessary.

Nothing new here imho.

At least not new in the last 50+ odd years.

I imagine this has been happening since the dawn of time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Commission_to_Inve...

Just a quick comment on "Nothing new here imho." One of Martin Luther King's friends and supporters, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, said the following:

"I am surprised every morning that I see the sunshine again. When I see an act of evil, I’m not accommodated. I don’t accommodate myself to the violence that goes on everywhere; I’m still surprised. That’s why I’m against it, why I can hope against it. We must learn how to be surprised. Not to adjust ourselves. I am the most maladjusted person in society."

I think this perspective is what drove Heschel to "pray with his legs" as he put it. I appreciate this perspective of spirituality, and thought it might be insightful.

At least the decades-long civil rights campaigns that MLK Jr., X and others were part of led to actual demonstrations, wide-scale public unrest and finally, major legislative changes.

Compared to that, the Wikileaks, Snowden leaks and Panama Papers revelations have resulted in tumbleweeds.

As it turns out, fleeing the country and hiding in your nations nominal rival is no way to start a grassroots campaign to thwart civil injustice.

Snark aside, King wanted to lead a movement and take all the associated risks with it. In the end, history showed us that he would become a martyr before seeing his goals met.

I can’t fault Snowden, for wanting only to blow the whistle then immediately seek personal safety.

Apples to oranges.

King was fighting against non technical, publicly understood, explicit interpretations of laws carried out by local/state police.

Snowden was/is fighting against secret interpretations of laws dealing with highly technical subject matter carried out by secret police seeking national security on a global scale.

Moreover, remember that as soon as King spoke out against the national security state in his Beyond Vietnam speech, a great many of his supporters abandoned him and the secret police drastically ramped up their campaign to neutralize him; he was assassinated exactly 1 year later.

So?

I mean you are right, but you are right in a very odd way. Imagine this headline:

Local boy gets beat to death.

Then some random guy comes to comment: "Well that happens all the time, it's not news."

I mean sure, it's true, but it's callous, it's minimizing and trivializing what happened, it's acting like it's always inevitable and it's not bringing anything new to the table. It's not just helping, it's actually detracting from any meaningful conversation. In short, I get the feeling that such responses come from smug people who aren't very kind. Not saying you are, just saying how you come off to me.

I am not sure what you were responding to, but my "Nothing new here" comment was directly referring to the OP's statement that read:

>Nice, I see we're entering the new era of us surveillance.

(Emphasis mine)

So I just said it's not new.

That's all.

I apologize profusely for coming off as smugly unkind!

> Nothing new here imho.

True statement. However - the laws are mostly officially predicated on this not being true. They're predicated on people whose stuff gets subpoened and end up under surveillance actually having more of a hint of guilt, rather than mere association. There's a mismatch between laws and a legal system that surveil and subpoena and investigate based on some kind of evidence, and putting someone into that system based on mere association.

> a judge issued a gag order and a data handoff request on a private citizen to Google without probable cause

They weren't a US citizen they where Australian so the judge didn't need probable cause.

It is perfectly legal and that should make any foreigner question their relationship with America.

Do we really want an ally that has proven them selves as totalitarian as China and is determined to spy on us?

They weren't a US citizen they where Australian so the judge didn't need probable cause.

Why do so many people think that human rights flow from US citizenship? That's not how the Constitution works. The 4th Amendment to the Constitution doesn't say anything about citizenship:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Bill of Rights is a set of limitations on the government, saying that the government is not allowed to do these things. It doesn't say anything about who they might hypothetically be doing them to, just that they cannot do it.

So regardless of your citizenship, the government can't prevent you from practicing your religion, can't throw you in jail without a trial, and they can't search you without a warrant. This applies to any actions the US government takes, regardless of who they're directed against and where.

That's clearly untrue. Otherwise we wouldn't have the CIA as an organization to spy on foreigners.

It is true you don't need to be a US citizen to have protection. However, you do need to be under the jurisdiction of the US (on US soil). Otherwise, the US Constitutional rights don't apply to you.

No, the applicability of Constitutional rights outside the US has yet to be completely settled. The Supreme Court discussed that issue somewhat in Hernandez v. Mesa in the current session. I suggest listening to the oral arguments on oyez.org. It is a sad and infuriating, but also fascinating case.

The CIA doesn't feed or perform as a part of the United States Justice system (parallel construction or the occasional slip aside).

Therefore, using it as a argument for why due process is only restricted to a certain group is a bit of a non-sequitur. A case against a foreign person still has to be conducted through proper channels, either with Constitutional protections in force if the U.S. has ultimate jurisdiction, or through diplomatic channels to ensure conformance with whatever other country considers due process or actionable if the U.S. doesn't have ultimate jurisdiction. This doesn't really negate the GP's point in the way you may have been intending to.

I agree (unfortunately) with everything you said.

While the government technically isn't allowed to do some of these things, the way our judicial system works, there's no lever with which these can be stopped (other than at the ballot box, and it seems no one cares enough to vote based on this). In particular, what little controversy there was surrounding the Edward Snowden revelations showed us that the Courts don't recognize any of us as having standing to pursue the question in court.

The meaning of that amendment turns on the phrase "the people". Who, exactly, are they? Many constitutional cases have determined that you are a member of "the people" by being either physically in the US, or outside but a US citizen.

See also FISA.

You've clearly never read most OLC memos. Especially ones used to justify killing random Iraqis.

This touches on the Guantanamo Bay thing, too, where people are being held without trial. The gov't position is that they're enemy combatants, and thus covered by the rules of war.

I don't buy that, but there you go. It just goes to show that the people (whoever they might be) need to be continually vigilant - in a sense, government is always the adversary.

The sixteenth amendment to the US constitution says:

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."

Are you saying that the US congress has the legal authority to collect income taxes from every human on earth?

>Do we really want an ally that has proven them selves as totalitarian as China and is determined to spy on us?

The US went through a judicial process and didn't just imprison or delete this person's account ( I know this isn't a US national), but this is a false equivalency to say that this process is even close to China when China currently has over a million prisoners in concentration camps.

Places like gitmo aside, almost everyone goes through a judicial process before they're locked up. China has judicial processes too. It's a question of the integrity of those processes.

If you'd like to understand the integrity of the US process, please read The New Jim Crow. It's not at all clear the US process is better than China's.

It's not at all clear the US process is better than China's.

Yes..just last week I was stopped outside Pennsylvania Avenue and forced to install a government mandated app on my phone and submit a DNA sample...

Right right, the whatabouttheUSbeingracist argument. The US does not put people in jail for political speech.

I don't think that's quite the argument.

The argument is that the US justice system uses pressure of plea bargains to put millions of innocent people in prison, financial pressure to keep millions of people from getting justice, etc.

The level of injustice seems at least similar.

You're right the reasons are different. But until we fix our courts, we don't quite have the moral high ground here.

Plus gitmo.

US has about 5 times as many people locked up, proportionally, as China.

China doesn't need to keep them locked up. China has the largest rate of organ transplants in the world, the highest rates of executions (actual number a state secret) yet has low rates of organ donors with trial registration schemes only starting within the last decade. Guess where they get the organs from.

Journalists investigating the suppression of Falun Gong estimated that approximately 60,000 convicted members were executed and their organs harvested. People are routinely arrested and never heard from again. In some cases families have been told a relative was executed years previously, but often they hear nothing at all.

In 2008 China's own deputy health minister estimated over 60% of transplant organs were sourced from prisoners, but Chinese officials have clamped up about this in recent years. They have occasionally said that this source of organs has been excluded, but there's no way to verify this as rates of donor registration aren't known, rates of executions are a state secret and none of the people or facilities involved are known or open to investigations.

So yes, sure, just like the USA.

> We kill suspects whose names we know, and whose names we don’t; we kill the guilty and the not guilty; we kill men, but also women and children; we kill by day and by night; we fire missiles at confirmed visual targets, but also at cellphone numbers we hope belong to targets.

> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”

> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-...

The US military's stance is that this is war.

Certainly there's no rule that during war one has to know the name of someone before killing them.

We are entering a new era and no one knows what the rules are.

That, while terrible, has nothing to do with the subject being discussed. That's plain whataboutism.

... Not to mention "Bodies" exhibit, filled with corpses of Chinese prisoners -- very reason I refuse to buy tickets.

I don't think having people in concentration camps getting their organs harvested is so similar that comparing numbers makes sense.

I'm amazed at just how little press coverage that is getting. Some public figure says something that's not sufficiently woke and it's on the front page of every news site in the country. China gets caught putting religious and ethnic minorities into camps and harvests their organs and most Americans haven't heard about it.

This is what leads me to believe the information is shaky at best. The press has no issues reporting “bad and scary” news about China since it sells, and they report on the re-education camps all the time. However, if they are shying away from the “organ harvesting” story, then it’s probably suspect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1018646

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/11/16/china-cov...

https://www.foxnews.com/world/organ-harvesting-china-survivo...

https://nypost.com/2019/06/23/the-ugly-truth-about-chinas-or...

https://qz.com/1717338/china-accused-of-harvesting-organs-fr...

https://www.chinaorganharvest.org/

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-nightmare-of-human-orga...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-rights-organ-harves...

It's getting reported on by major outlets, just not very loudly or prominently. There have been articles in the Guardian, The Daily Mail, Reuters, Forbes and others. The press frequently gives China a pass on things that any Western country would be pilloried for.

I hear this claim repeated a lot, but has anybody got a good source for it?

All I can see are extreme news sources (Breitbart) and NBC reporting on https://chinatribunal.com, and while I know nothing about the chinatribunal, its name somewhat implies a clear stance at the outset.

Particularly in relation to the Uyghur muslims, I can't find any evidence that they're having their organs harvested

Here you go, from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/17/china-is-harve...

It's about the Fulan Gong movement, FWIW.

This is reporting the same china tribunal mentioned in my OP. Interestingly, the interviewee mentioned by the Guardian here 'did not see any direct evidence of forced organ removal'; if the tribunal heard evidence from people with direct experience of organ removal, I'm surprised they were not quoted. It seems like I may have to dig deeper into the tribunal's actual report to gain more insight.

> The China Tribunal has been initiated by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC), an international not for profit organisation, with headquarters in Australia and National Committees in the UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

I find the fact that the media doesn’t report this, but they do report the re-education camps, suggests the sources aren’t very solid.

It seems that you created a new name just to doubt organ harvesting by China. You say the media doesn't report it, but a single search for china organ harvesting turns up this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1018646

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/11/16/china-cov...

https://www.foxnews.com/world/organ-harvesting-china-survivo...

https://nypost.com/2019/06/23/the-ugly-truth-about-chinas-or...

https://qz.com/1717338/china-accused-of-harvesting-organs-fr...

https://www.chinaorganharvest.org/

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-nightmare-of-human-orga...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-rights-organ-harves...

Yeah agreed. It is terrible that US has the largest prison population and it is also terrible that China has harvested organs and puts Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps. They are terrible in different dimensions and it would serve no clear purpose to me to try and figure out which is the “more terrible” one to focus the criticism on to the cost of ignoring the other.

The people you mentioned in the US went through a judicial proceeding which resulted in their imprisonment. We can debate the merits (or lack therefore) of the laws broken which resulted in their imprisonment, but the point is there was a process and a review in place before said people were sent off to prison.

Contrast that situation to China. China has over 1 million Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps for non-criminal, political reasons. Most (if not all) of the said Uyghur people imprisoned were given no judicial review, and have no access to legal counsel.

God damn I hate the whataboutism on HN I see with regards to China - it is really rampant. It may shatter some folks' liberal sentiments but the US really is not the worst country on the block (planet), by a long-long margin.

The person has no rights under that judicial process so it's no defence.

The constitution does not explicitly grant due process to non-citizens, but statutes and judicial rulings since have generally enforced that non-citizens have most of the same rights as citizens when it comes to criminal investigations. I don't think we know whether or not there was probable cause to believe a crime had been committed. We don't even know what sort of search order was granted. For example, maybe the account owner is not the subject of the investigation, but the account is believed to contain information that would be relevant nonetheless.

This is a complex topic, and is especially unclear when the person is not on US soil, so saying "judicial rulings since have generally enforced..." is not really accurate.

As totalitarian as China? Come on. It's not even close.

I'll assume you're exaggerating for effect, but please don't do that.

I don't think people understand how much hyperbole like this undermines their arguments.

"I think this is horrible" [maybe I don't agree but it's a valid opinion]

"The US is as totalitarian as China" [ok, this person doesn't know what they are talking about]

Exactly, and it really diminishes the plight of the billion plus people in China, the citizens of Hong Kong who were sold out by the UK, and the horrific situation forced upon the Uighurs.

> They weren't a US citizen they where Australian so the judge didn't need probable cause.

This is not true, the warrant served would absolutely have to be signed under a finding of probable cause.

I believe the GP is saying they don't believe the probable cause was valid, not that no probable cause was given.

> Do we really want an ally that has proven them selves as totalitarian as China and is determined to spy on us?

No, but who would that be and how is it related to your points about the US?

There is a warrant so there is PC, by Bean's own admission:

>…vocal & active supporter of WL & Assange for 10yrs, was in a twitter DM group that incl wikileaks, visited assange several times at the embassy

https://twitter.com/SomersetBean/status/1201620076383940610

he was not directly involved.

Isn't that the point of the subpoena? To get information that will help them make that determination. Cops investigate people who turn out to be innocent and no charges are filed.

In his case, he wasn't charged with anything as far as I can tell.

The problem is that the "reason" was simply being associated with someone. We need to creste privacy laws, this assumption thst it is OK to go through someone's personal life merely for being in someone else's contact list is unethical.

There should be compelling evidence, and after some short time period say > 5 years the person should be notified of the investigation.

Filing a subpoena to get information related to an active investigation is a reasonably common event. The requirement for and around the subpoena are the privacy laws.

It's perhaps not reasonable to expect any legislature to pass privacy laws that block legitimate subpoenas that are part of an investigative process.

No the app for the warrant is sealed, we do not know what the PC for it's issuance was. Likely there was something beyond association.

Did you mean < 5 years?

> ... a fishing expedition?

Maybe we should call it a phishing expedition?

I am puzzled here...the desc does not match other stuff he did to trigger the judge order or is there other stuff you have not disclosed yet?

Ddin't know this person, now i know, the twitter account has lots of great info, thanks DOJ for bringing this into my attention.

With regard to email services, I'm a happy Protonmail user. I recommend it to everybody. It's free and it allegedly stores only encrypted data on the servers.

I try also to avoid spreading too much information while browsing by using some Firefox Add-ons like Noscript (set to block Google Analytics and others by default) and Cookie Autodestruct to allow persistent cookies only on Personal and Work tab containers.

Mozilla is doing a pretty good job with privacy issues.

Does protonmail also ignore government subpoenas? Even the equivalent in the EU?

The answer you're looking for is... it depends: https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency-report/

Details here: https://protonmail.com/fr/law-enforcement

According to that link, Protonmail would observe and respond to a warrant from local government the same way Google does.

the difference is all data on protonmail servers is stored encrypted, and users have decryption keys in their client apps

Reading this comment thread hours after everyone else has posted, it sure is strange that a handful of individuals are defending the state from pretty much every objection by random commenters. I'm not a conspiracy guy, but this feels like when I watched the Hong Kong Blizzard protest, and you had all these guys named like "John Harrison" and "Alex Jeffries" spamming messages about how Tienanmen Square was just western propaganda. It feels like a couple of accounts pushing a specific agenda.

"SEALED v. SEALED"!

I think you may politely respond with politically correct statement:

I don't give a [REDACTED] and "SEALED" may go and [REDACTED] themselves in the [REDACTED].

Well this is ■■■■■■ we are talking about and after all, this an ■■■■■■■■■■■■ issue anyway.

Having ■■■■■■ run our lives like this and with the crowning of ■■■■■■ ■■■■■■ of ■■■■■■■■ and ■■■■■■, I don't see ■■■ changing or ■■■■■■ doing the same anytime soon.

So as long as we all have ■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■■, we are all absolutely ■■■■■■■!

A PACER search didn't return anything for the case number referenced in the email.

Although, the user did post an update later on: https://twitter.com/SomersetBean/status/1201913860745236481

Still sealed?

They were already listening on those embassy meetings though: https://www.globalresearch.ca/julian-assange-video-conferenc...

Can said information include everything gleaned from Google searches and pages with Google analytics? I.e. a full browsing history?

Yes, and gmail if you use, you'r gps/gsm cordinates over the past 3 years and more if you have an android phone.

The scary thing as you pointed out with analytics, even if you have no google account google still hold data on you. If you use a private email server google still have a copy of every email you sent to gmail or received and will hand them over as its associated with you.

What do you mean with "If you use a private email server google still have a copy of every email you [..] received"?

I believe they mean: Even if you don't use gmail, but you correspond with other people who do use gmail, the other people's copies of your messages are linked to you and handed over.

It's hard to avoid corresponding with other people who use gmail. But it's even harder, when you realise this includes people using their own private email domains that are handled by the gmail service without your knowledge. Many companies do this, even if it's just for the excellent spam filtering.

Probably pretty much everything. Think like the party who requested it. They just accessed someone's private digital life, you think they will be shy asking for data?

Location history, installed apps, photos, videos, Gmail, etc. best to assume they have a full export.

I think what the grand parent was hinting with Google Analytics is data collected outside of what's stored directly in the Google account. If you visit a site that has Google Analytics on or if you fill a Recaptcha, do they match this with your Google account and store it somewhere, outside of your account? And is this data available to third parties?

What if you use Google's DNS servers? (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4)

Would Google log and hand over all DNS lookups too?

Do I trust Google to do the right thing? Hell no. Do I trust Google legal to not directly lie to me? I do.

> Google Public DNS stores two sets of logs: temporary and permanent. The temporary logs store the full IP address of the machine you're using. We have to do this so that we can spot potentially bad things like DDoS attacks and so we can fix problems, such as particular domains not showing up for specific users.

> We delete these temporary logs within 24 to 48 hours.

> In the permanent logs, we don't keep personally identifiable information or IP information. We do keep some location information (at the city/metro level) so that we can conduct debugging, analyze abuse phenomena. After keeping this data for two weeks, we randomly sample a small subset for permanent storage.

> We don't correlate or combine information from our temporary or permanent logs with any personal information that you have provided Google for other services.

We are talking a company of which the most profitable part is targeted ads. You really doubt they will not try to group as much information of a single entity as they possibly can? People will have all sorts of excuses like "they can't do that, cookieless domains" etc etc but I am fairly certain that each and every data point which Google has access to, will be tried to be matched with some sort of account or account husk. It might not all be visible or directly accessible/usable until they can segment and label it but they have the data and want to use it either now or in the future.

I am super sick of this meme. No, not every data point Google has on you is matched to an account and used for ads. Get real, friend.

When Google DNS says they keep templogs for 24-48h and anonymized permanent logs for analytics, that's what happens.

I doubt I can convince you but the constant drumbeat of everything used for ads is just so annoying (and wrong)

If Google did not use every iota of information to help target ads, then somebody at Google is slacking. It's their core business. As a corporation, each employee is obliged to do their best to advance Google's goals. The employees are very smart, by and large.

This all adds up to, every way conceivable to use information to target ads, is used that way. I'm not trying to be kind or unkind, cynical or mean. Its just the logic of the situation.

That's their business model but not everything they do is in support of that. The hundred or thousands of employees that works on GSuite-only products like Currents and Meet don't care about phoning home data for ad targeting purposes. The same goes for a multitude of other things they do, eg. hardware, cloud computing, security, mapping (as in the actual mapping; I know G maps shows ads), and probably also 99% of people on the Chrome/Android teams.

And yet, the data they collect would reasonably be available to those in Google that do work in targeted ads. And they would know what to do with it.

As per this whitepaper[0], data made by organizations (in "G Suite Core Services"[1]) is not available to their ad platform, and most likely includes all the related services that are limited to G Suite accounts (Hangouts Chat, Currents, Meet, Jamboard, etc.).

> We do not scan for advertising purposes in Gmail or other G Suite services. Google does not collect or use data in G Suite services for advertising purposes.

I mention the other divisions of Google because what their job title is means they aren't "obligated" to collect everything for use by the ad platform, as the parent implies.

I also doubt much of the actual data is available to the ad platform. Do they know you visited console.cloud.google.com? Most likely via Chrome sync history and/or Google Analytics. Do they know whether or not your cloud project is running a single n1 instance or a fleet of c2 instances? I doubt it, especially because there's not much reason to encourage other cloud computing services to advertise to someone that's directly using a competing Google service.

0: https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-white...

1: https://gsuite.google.com/terms/user_features.html

Of course, in the event that you've asked Google to retain that data and the order compels its production.

Does someone know if in cases like these Google will inform you why this happened?

When/if the gag is lifted google does in fact notify the user with what it can.

Is this guy a political dissident or something?

Suspected, it seems. Direct contact with Julian Assange.

I’m not a lawyer but in this case that guy’s data getting sent to DoJ doesn’t really bother me...

That's not how it should work. You could just go fish for anyone's data on the basis that he had a relation with someone that broke the law.

Data should be protected just like the intel you are giving to your lawyer or your doctors. There is absolutely no reason a government should be able to simply catch your data without a reasonable cause.

Knowing someone is NOT a reasonable cause. If they had proof that he did something that's a different story, but then they'd just catch him wouldn't they?

> You could just go fish for anyone's data on the basis that he had a relation with someone that broke the law

I believe what you're describing is the way the Prohibition-era gangs were broken up. It's a long-standing policy that this is acceptable policing in the US; it's not generally considered a fishing expedition if police investigate a person who associates frequently with a person they're building a criminal case on.

I can't help but feel like this person wants this type of attention.

Attention is a powerful drug, and victimhood is an increasingly viable way to get a steady supply.

None of which diminishes the underlying privacy and justice issues here, but yeah. Just look at the Twitter thread. Plenty of adoring fans.

>Jokes aside, the only "connection" Bean has with that inquiry is one of association: not with Russia or Trump; but with WikiLeaks & Julian Assange.

I'm not sure I understand this sentence, Wikileaks, Julian Assange, Russia, and Trump would all be very clearly part of an investigation into whether Trump's campaign sought a foreign government's help in influencing a presidential election.

Am I missing something? I have no idea who this person on Twitter is or what their connection is with Wikileaks or Assange, i.e. did they donate once to Wikileaks in which case this seems crazy, or are they much more involved and thus their Google data would reasonably be included in any investigation into the matter? But it seems quite reasonable that if the latter is true that their data would be pulled for the Mueller investigation.

Well according to later tweets they went so far as to meet with Assange in person while he was holed up in the embassy. That's certainly a step beyond just vocally supporting him on Twitter, at least.

Ah, I didn't see that. Well then in that case this seems somewhat reasonable?

Enough to explain why data about his Google account might have been caught up in the investigation, perhaps.

Didn't the investigation end when the report was released?

Who is bean?

An Australian/British graphic designer who has been making graphic design resources in support of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange for ~10 years[1].

[1]https://www.gofundme.com/f/aussies-bring-assange-home-poster...

A little off topic, but as a US citizen, I find it chilling how strongly President Obama went after whistle blowers (as much as all previous presidents combined) and now President Trump is just as bad in this regard.

Whistle blower and journalist legal protection is a hard requirement for a free and democratic republic.

> Whistle blower and journalist legal protection

Just generalize privacy and data protection here to everyone. Restricting protections to certain groups is a massive strategic mistake for any form of civil liberty.

Exactly given what we know about journalists flexible approach to the law hacking a dead teenagers phones voice mail for example.

May be journalist should have the same oversight as the police MI5 and SIS do innocent smile

I agree

According to the first reply this is an investigation into Trump, not by Trump.

https://twitter.com/greekemmy/status/1201766690918408193

Whether under Omaba or Trump, how many career gov't employees (as opposed to political appointees) led the charge in going after whistle blowers? The careerists have more to lose from whistle blowers, I would think: the elected/political appointees can declare (feign?) righteous indignation and make mouth-noises about cleaning up corruption brought to light -- after all they are gone in 4 to 8 years and on to some other revolving door position. The careerists, on the other hand, could see their life's work go up in smoke if a whistle blower points blame in the direction of their area of government, even if they are innocent in any malfeasance. I'm not saying this is certainly the case, only that the Chief Executive very rarely sets the agenda for prosecution.

> Oh it's "SEALED v. SEALED; Case is not available to the public."

House members subpoena the call records of the president’s attorney, adversarial journalists, and other members of Congress. Secret FISA court warrants from known garbage “research”, and being involved in a lawsuits where you can’t even have proper legal representation because it’s all sealed.

What a garbage time for justice today.

Are you referring to the Steele dossier as "garbage 'research'"? If so, I don't quite understand your concept of garbage, given that much of it was proven correct. And I'd point out that the FBI says the dossier wasn't used for the FISA warrant.

Cue the deep state conspiracy theories, I suppose....

Yandex has an excellent email hosting. Almost G Suite level. At least there would be some real Russian connection.

https://connect.yandex.com/

Do you happen to know a great North-Korean email provider? I've heard they treat IT security even stricter than Russians.

Yandex could be a reasonable alternative to GMail for anyone who's much more likely to quarrel with the US government than with the Russian. Which probably applies to most denizens of the West. Sure, it's not the best opsec, but at least you know that unlike Google, when the DoJ says "jump!" Yandex is not going to say "how high?"

> Which probably applies to most denizens of the West.

Most denizens of the West seem to like Western democracy and, well, Putin doesn't. So Russia doesn't. So Yandex doesn't.

As one of the "denizens of the West" - we might hate on what the US does, but only because we believe it could do better. We have no such expectation of Putin.

I trust Russian and Chinese companies not to respond to US fishing expeditions violating my privacy more than I do US based companies.

As far as someone spying on my emails, I get that no matter who I go with other than self-hosting.

Yandex is actually a serious option. They allow you to use multiple personal domains for free. Main disadvantage is the occasional untranslated error message.

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