US government upon a secret court order forced Google Inc. and Sonic.net Inc. to hand over the email addresses related to WikiLeaks’ volunteer Jacob Appelbaum.
Sonic’s chief exec. , Dane Jasper, said that we tried to fight with government’s orders but it was proving more expensive than to turn over the email addresses to government. And we found it was a right thing to do eventually. He also mentioned that email addresses were demanded of those who had corresponded with Mr. Jacob Appelbaum in the past two years.
Whereas Google shied to comment over the issue.
WikiLeaks is a publisher of documents that people can submit anonymously. After WikiLeaks released a trove of classified government diplomatic cables last year, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said the U.S. was pursuing an “active criminal investigation” of WikiLeaks.
Since then the US government, in a clash with WikiLeaks, has been asking the companies like Google to provide the required data, and such orders have been passed secretly and without any search warrant. The orders have also been given to retrieval data from people’s cell phones. Several court decisions have questioned whether the law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
In 2009, Google began disclosing the volume of requests for user data it received from the U.S. government. In the six months ending Dec. 31, Google said it received 4,601 requests and complied with 94% of them. The data include all types of requests, including search warrants, subpoenas and requests under the 1986 law.
The secrecy makes it difficult to determine how often such court orders are used. But time to time the practice to carry out digital searches is becoming common.
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