I'm a huge critic of Jacob Appelbaum, whom I've documented as an open-source cultist and thuggish heckler of critics on Twitter. He's also a liar, claiming that US soldiers deliberately killed children in Iraq when they could not have possibly known that there were children in a vehicle of a driver who stopped to help wounded, armed persons whom were shot at by the US soldiers from a helicopter. The entire incident -- tendentiously released by WikiLeaks -- had enough problematic features to it and a need for investigation and more caution without tarting it up and lying about it. That they can and do lie and do so shamelessly taints everything about WikiLeaks.
I don't care for Tor or the cult around it, and it means nothing to me that the "government supports it" or "the government funds part of it". There are all kinds of goofs in government; it isn't some conservative establishment -- in some agencies, it's a war between "progressives" and liberals and conservatives over policy, inch by inch, paper by paper, grant by grant. I'm for fighting that war. Jacob's dining out on this credential doesn't mean he is somehow blessed or exempt from punishment if he commits a crime against the United States.
And he is suspected of aiding and abetting Julian Assange and others in the activist anarchist collective WikiLeaks which did indeed incite and benefit from the theft of classified US government documents as everyone knows. The question is whether they were actually involved in the stealing or only took advantage of Bradley Manning. Hopefully this will come out at trial.
Now, given my views of him, do I think the government should get to seize Jacob's email?
No, not unless they have a warrant. Yes, he's one of those arrogant e-thugs who goes around thuggishly abetting anti-American forces and hates government (except when it gives him a grant or a resume-booster), and yes he's objectively harming US diplomacy with this activity. But if the government went snooping in the email of every e-thug, they wouldn't have time to track the real criminals. Jacob is ultimately most likely to be what the Soviets called "an agent of influence" and not an actual subversive.
But we don't know, and if the US has a warrant for "probable cause," they should read his email to see if he actively helped steal government documents. That's ok to do. That's not only what a police state does; that's what a liberal democratic society protecting the rule of law, its citizens, its foreign interests, does when somebody steals its cables. Jacob is not a journalist; he's a technologist who helps people hide their tracks, and hides his own awfully well, too.
Julia Angwin at the Wall Street Journal, who is a very good technology reporter, author of a critical book about MySpace, certainly no wide-eyed fangirl about Silicon Valley and its ilk, seems to take the view in this piece that the government shouldn't get Jacob's email in a secret court order anyway because that would be government overreach.
The government tried to get Twitter to cooperate and failed -- and we heard nothing about it. Then they *did* get a *secret* court order and went to a company named Sonic that had information, and Sonic lost a court battle to resist them:
The U.S. government has obtained a controversial type of secret court order to force Google Inc. and small Internet provider Sonic.net Inc. to turn over information from the email accounts of WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Sonic said it fought the government's order and lost, and was forced to turn over information. Challenging the order was "rather expensive, but we felt it was the right thing to do," said Sonic's chief executive, Dane Jasper. The government's request included the email addresses of people Mr. Appelbaum corresponded with the past two years
The rest of this article is behind a paywall and no, I'm not linking to John Perry Barlow's copybotted copy of it from Twitter -- another e-thug.
The question seems to be: should the court order not be secret? But then, if it isn't secret, how could you effectively fight people who have stolen a quarter of a million of diplomatic cables? I think it's ok to debate these issues. The law for electronic documents uses the term "reasonable grounds" instead of "probable cause". So perhaps it *is* unlawful and unconstitutional regarding unreasonable search and seizure -- but this should be debated.
Here's the problem. Do we want our world ruled by e-thugs like Jacob Appelbaum, unaccountable to anyone? No one wants police-state activity but the feds do now have a warrant. Not cooperating with that warrant sets up the proposition of anarchy or at least selective civil disobedience from the very powerful social media platforms and Internet services of Silicon Valley. Is this what we're going to see more of -- their defiance of democratic government rule?
Some people loathe the thought of losing privacy to the feds more than the thought of the privacy they already lost to Facebook or Twitter. They think those platform providers might be more trustworthy at the end of the day, especially if they defy requests from the G-men to peruse IP addresses and content of email.
I'm not sure this is a good bargain, having Mark Zuckerberg run our government and society just because he is big and all-powerful -- and I'm definitely sure I don't want Jacob Appelbaum to do it. So what this comes down to is a power struggle, and not a pretty one, and one without pretty choices.
The government's argument was persuasive. They said IP addresses are akin to phone numbers, not exact locators. In fact, to hear snotty geeks on forums tell it, IP addresses aren't akin to phone numbers but could be only a vague geographic location, plus they dynamically change, plus different people share them. Der, we get all that. Even so, they are one identifier. And the government asks for phone records all the time when a crime is suspected, so getting coy about IP addresses seems really edge-casing it and Fisking it for sure.
Geeks endlessly argue (and they do on the WSJ as well) as to whether these addresses are fixed or dynamic or are in a range. (Um, they're often in a range, but they can be fixed and not dynamic, too, so both are true -- anyone running a blog sees that basic truth.)
I do have to wonder why the WSJ titles this piece "Secret Orders Target Email" when...a court order was obtained even if secret. In terrorist-related cases, court orders can be secret too. It's simply not the case that every single secret court order is evil, given what we face. And the terrorism of e-thugs taking down government and corporate sites and causing millions of dollars of damages is real harm, like real-world terrorism against people and buildings, even if a lesser crime. So why is the WSJ denouncing it? It's part of that conservative fear of "Big Government," I guess -- they want to make sure the government -- especially the Obama Administration! -- doesn't get to stock up on secret powers to do secret stuff. Understood. All to the good.
Probably this could be fixed by revising the law to tighten up the language and make the act not secret unless some really persuasive "clear and present danger" of compelling nature could be cited, and certainly the person searched should get a notification of it.
What I would like to ensure is that this debate isn't, "Waaaaa, Jakie's civil rights are violated and gummint is evil" -- I want it to be a debate about this: what do you do when Jacob, e-thug extraordinaire, whose life work consists of hiding things online deliberately to evade governments, who has lied outrageously about US government intents, and has aided and abetted WikiLeaks, claims that the government shouldn't read his email and has no case about his involvement in a crime?" I do think that does have to be the debate and not abstract civil rights invocations as if no crime took place. A crime *did* take place -- and half the people whining about rights here don't think it did -- that is the key problem. The government has to make its case -- and in this case, it has blundered around.
Yes, that means they will hide their tracks better. If you look at the war between the feds and Anonymous, the feds have taken some dozen prisoners, but they're losing. And I personally do not want them to lose, because what Anonymous represents is a far more horrible fate for all of us. It's sad that more people aren't conscious of this.
It may never be possible to tie Assange or Appelbaum to the theft of government documents. That doesn't mean that a moral condemnation of them can't be made -- it surely can and should.
One good thing comes out of this, in terms of Twit fights and forums battles: the geekiest geek of them all has filed, with his lawyers, a motion to vacate a court order based on the grounds that IP addresses *are* locators. So for everymore, one can site that to shush these people saying it isn't, eh?
Of course, with all this hub-ub, the tracks *are* long ago destroyed and "we may never know".
PS
Boingboing has naturally taken Appelbaum's site, and reported this "awesomeness":
Security researcher Christopher Soghoian tweets, "Not only did Sonic.net fight the court order from DOJ, but it has now adopted a 2 week data retention policy for IP logs. Awesome."
So, welcome to the Wired State, it's pretty much being ushered in. No democratic, elected government will be able to control it.
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