WikiLeaks and Julian Assange Hero's in the World

[WaTcHeR]

WikiLeaks founder's court hearing in December. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

WikiLeaks has demanded that Google and Facebook reveal the contents of any US subpoenas they may have received after it emerged that a court in Virginia had ordered Twitter to secretly hand over details of accounts on the micro-blogging site by five figures associated with the group, including Julian Assange.

Amid strong evidence that a US grand jury has begun a wide-ranging trawl for details of what networks and accounts WikiLeaks used to communicate with Bradley Manning, the US serviceman accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of sensitive government cables, some of those named in the subpoena said they would fight disclosure.

"Today, the existence of a secret US government grand jury espionage investigation into WikiLeaks was confirmed for the first time as a subpoena was brought into the public domain," WikiLeaks said in a statement.

The writ, approved by a court in Virginia in December, demands that the San Franscisco-based micro-blogging site hand over all details of five individuals' accounts and private messaging on Twitter – including the computers and networks used.

They include WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Manning, Icelandic MP Brigitta Jonsdottir and Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp. Three of them – Gonggrijp, Assange and Jonsdottir – were named as "producers" of the first significant leak from the US cables cache: a video of an Apache helicopter attack that killed civilians and journalists in Baghdad.

The legal document also targets an account held by Jacob Appelbaum, a US computer programmer whose computer and phones were examined by US officials in July after he was stopped returning from Holland to America.

The court issuing the subpoena said it had "reasonable grounds" to believe Twitter held information "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation".

It ordered Twitter not to notify the targets of the subpoena – an order the company successfully challenged.

The court order crucially demands that Twitter hand over details of source and destination internet protocol addresses used to access the accounts, which would help investigators identify how the named individuals communicated with each other, as well as email addresses used.

The emergence of the subpoena appears to confirm for the first time the existence of a secret grand jury empanelled to investigate whether individuals associated with WikiLeaks, and Assange in particular, can be prosecuted for alleged conspiracy with Manning to steal the classified documents.

The US attorney general, Eric Holder, has already said publicly that he believes Assange could be prosecuted under US espionage laws. The court that issued the subpoena is in the same jurisdiction where press reports have located a grand jury investigating Assange.

It has been reported that Manning has been offered a plea bargain if he co-operates with the investigation.

The emergence of the Twitter subpoena – which was unsealed after a legal challenge by the company – was revealed after WikiLeaks announced it believed other US Internet companies had also been ordered to hand over information about its members' activities.

WikiLeaks condemned the court order, saying it amounted to harassment.

"If the Iranian government was to attempt to coercively obtain this information from journalists and activists of foreign nations, human rights groups around the world would speak out," Assange said in a statement.

Jonsdottir said in a Twitter message: "I think I am being given a message, almost like someone breathing in a phone."

Twitter has declined to comment, saying only that its policy is to notify its users where possible of government requests for information.

The specific clause of the Patriot act used to acquire the subpoena is one that the FBI has described as necessary for "obtaining such records [that] will make the process of identifying computer criminals and tracing their internet communications faster and easier".

The subpoena itself is an unusual one known as a 2703(d). Recently a federal appeals court ruled this kind of order was insufficient to order the disclosure of the contents of communication. Significantly, however, that ruling is binding in neither Virginia – where the Twitter subpoena was issued – nor San Francisco where Twitter is based.

Assange has promised to fight the order, as has Jonsdottir, who said in a Twitter message that she had "no intention to hand my information over willingly".

Appelbaum, whose Twitter feed suggested he was travelling in Iceland, said he was apprehensive about returning to the US. "Time to try to enjoy the last of my vacation, I suppose," he tweeted.

Gonggrijp praised Twitter for notifying him and others that the US had subpoenaed his details. "It appears that Twitter, as a matter of policy, does the right thing in wanting to inform their users when one of these comes in," Gonggrijp said. "Heaven knows how many places have received similar subpoenas and just quietly submitted all they had on me."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/ja ... -subpoenas

[WaTcHeR]

LONDON (AP) — The American ambassador to Reykjavik has been summoned to explain why U.S. investigators are trying to access the private details of an Icelandic lawmaker's online activity as they try to build a criminal case against WikiLeaks.

Revelations that the U.S. Justice Department obtained a court order to examine data held by Twitter Inc. on Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian who sits on the country's Foreign Affairs Committee, immediately caused consternation in the tiny North Atlantic nation.

"(It is) very serious that a foreign state, the United States, demands such personal information of an Icelandic person, an elected official," Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson told Icelandic broadcaster RUV.

"This is even more serious when put (in) perspective and concerns freedom of speech and people's freedom in general," he added.

Jonsdottir is a one-time WikiLeaks collaborator also known for her work on Iceland's media initiative, which aims to turn the island nation into a free speech haven. Jonsdottir told The Associated Press she was too overwhelmed to comment Sunday, but in a recent post to Twitter, she said she was talking with American lawyers about how to beat the order — and was drumming up support in Iceland as well.

U.S. Ambassador Luis E. Arreaga has been summoned for a meeting at Iceland's Foreign Ministry to discuss the issue, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Urdur Gunnarsdottir said Sunday. It was not clear when the meeting was taking place.

U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik said no one there would be available for comment until Monday.

The evolving diplomatic spat illustrates the challenge American prosecutors face as they weigh whether to bring charges against WikiLeaks, an international, tech-savvy operation that has angered and embarrassed Washington with a series of huge leaks of classified information.

The most recent disclosure of thousands of secret State Department cables saw U.S. diplomats being ordered to gather the DNA and fingerprints of their international counterparts, captured backroom dealing over issues such as Guantanamo and rendition, and publicized unflattering assessments of friends and foes alike.

The U.S. says the disclosures have damaged international diplomacy and put the safety of informants and foreign human rights activists at risk. WikiLeaks has dismissed the claims, but Washington has been trying to find a way to prosecute the group and its leader, 39-year-old Julian Assange, who is currently in England.

A court order unsealed earlier this week revealed that American authorities had gone to court to seek data from Twitter about Assange, Jonsdottir, and others either known or suspected to have interacted with WikiLeaks.

Some of those named in the court order have said they suspect other companies — such as Facebook Inc., Google Inc., and the eBay Inc.-owned Internet communications company Skype — have also been secretly asked to hand over their personal data.

Assange and Jonsdottir have vowed to fight the court order.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... a12d5ccaa1

[WaTcHeR]

Leaked: US government strategy to prevent leaks

The US government's 11-page document on how to get various US government agencies to prevent future leaks has been leaked to MSNBC. It doesn't get any more ironic than that. After the various leaks made by WikiLeaks, the US government understandably wants to limit the number of potential leaks, but their strategy apparently isn't implemented yet. Here's the crux of the memo, which was sent this week to senior officials at all agencies that use classified material:

"Each initial assessment should be completed by January 28, 2011, and should include the following with respect to the attached list of self-assessment questions:"

1. Assess what your agency has done or plans to do to address any perceived vulnerabilities, weaknesses, or gaps on automated systems in the post-WikiLeaks environment.
2. Assess weakness or gaps with respect to the attached list of questions, and formulate plans to resolve the issues or to shift or acquire resources to address those weaknesses or gaps.
3. Assess your agency's plans for changes and upgrades to current classified networks, systems, applications, databases, websites, and online collaboration environments ­ as well as for all new classified networks, systems, applications, databases, websites or online collaboration environments that are in the planning, implementation, or testing phases - in terms of the completeness and projected effectiveness of all types of security controls called for by applicable law and guidance (including but limited to those issued by the National Security Staff, the Committee on National Security Systems, the National Institute for Standards and Technology).
4. Assess all security, counterintelligence, and information assurance policy and regulatory documents that have been established by and for your department or agency.

It's clear that the Obama administration is telling federal agencies to take aggressive steps to prevent further leaks. According to the document, these steps include figuring out which employees might be most inclined to leak classified documents, by using psychiatrists and sociologists to assess their trustworthiness. The memo also suggests that agencies require all their employees to report any contacts with members of the news media they may have.


http://www.techspot.com/news/41889-leak ... leaks.html

[WaTcHeR]

"WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been accused of 'treason' by a Florida man seeking damages for distress caused by the site's revelations about the US government. From the article: 'David Pitchford, a Florida trailer park resident, names Assange and WikiLeaks as defendants in a personal injury suit filed with the Florida Southern District Court in Miami. In the complaint filed on 6th January, Pitchford alleges that Assange's negligence has caused "hypertension," "depression" and "living in fear of being stricken by another heart attack and/or stroke" as a result of living "in fear of being on the brink of another nuclear [sic] WAR."' Just for good measure, it also alleges that Assange and WikiLeaks are guilty of 'terorism [sic], espionage and treason.'"



http://idle.slashdot.org/story/11/01/13 ... caring-Him

[WaTcHeR]

ZURICH (Reuters) – Swiss police arrested ex-banker Rudolf Elmer on Wednesday for giving data to Wikileaks, hours after he was found guilty of breaching strict Swiss bank secrecy laws in another case.

At 1830 (1730 GMT) Elmer was taken into custody by police, having just been found guilty of breaching strict banking secrecy for publicizing private client data and of threatening an employee at his former firm Julius Baer.

"The state prosecutor's office is checking to see whether Rudolf Elmer has violated Swiss banking law by handing the CD over to WikiLeaks," the Zurich cantonal (state) police and state prosecutor said in a joint statement.

They declined to give further details.

At a news conference in London on Monday, Elmer handed over data on hundreds of offshore bank account holders to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, saying he wanted to draw attention to financial abuses.

WikiLeaks has angered U.S. authorities by publishing hundreds of secret diplomatic cables.

SUSPENDED FINE

The court had sentenced Elmer to a fine of 7,200 Swiss francs ($7,505), suspended for two years, without giving reasons as they will come in a written judgment. The prosecution had demanded eight months jail and a fine of 2,000 francs.

Wednesday's court ruling did not concern WikiLeaks and the defense will decide whether to appeal within 10 days.

Judge Sebastian Aeppli acquitted Rudolf Elmer on charges he sought $50,000 for returning client data to former employer Julius Baer and that he made a bomb threat to the bank's headquarters.

Elmer, who helped bring WikiLeaks to prominence three years ago when he used it to publish secret client details, had admitted sending Julius Baer data to tax authorities.

But he had denied blackmail and a bomb threat against Julius Baer and said he never took payments in return for secret data.

Elmer spent a month in investigative custody in 2005 when the charges were first made against him.

"I am a critic of the system and want to tell society what happens in these murky oases," Elmer, who ran the Cayman Islands branch of the Swiss bank dedicated to wealthy clients until he was fired in 2002, told a news conference before the verdict.

Elmer said Baer waged a campaign of "psychoterror" against him and his family and offered him 500,000 francs to keep quiet. He said he had never taken payments in return for secret data.

But he admitted writing anonymous emails in 2005 threatening to send client details to tax authorities and the media if Julius Baer did not stop unspecified actions.

"The situation was very threatening. We were very scared and I thought the bank was behind it. That is why I sent the emails," Elmer told the court.

Elmer also admitted charges that he sent client details to Swiss tax authorities, but he denied threats against former colleagues.

WHISTLEBLOWER?

Julius Baer, which has denied its Cayman branch was used for tax dodging, says Elmer waged a "campaign of personal intimidation and vendetta" against the bank after it refused his demands for financial compensation following his 2002 dismissal.

"We have supported the prosecution, the judge largely followed the prosecutor's argument," said Kurt Langhard, a lawyer for Julius Baer. "We are satisfied."

Speaking in court, Prosecutor Alexandra Bergmann said Elmer had cultivated the image of whistleblower only later in his dispute with Baer.

"While he was working on the Cayman Islands he didn't question the system as such," Bergmann said.

Elmer's lawyer Ganden Tethong Blattner said her client and his family had paid for standing up to a powerful opponent.

"This is the story of a man who discovered misdeeds and was under constant surveillance for more than a year. This great pressure was aimed at silencing him," she said.

About a dozen protesters from the left-wing Alternative Liste party had gathered outside the court, holding up a banner, saying: "They want to hang Rudi, they let Kaspar off the hook," in a reference to UBS chairman Kaspar Villiger.

Switzerland last year gave details of about 4,450 UBS accounts to U.S. authorities as part of a deal to settle a tax probe into its biggest bank despite strict secrecy laws. None of its bankers were prosecuted in Switzerland.

Elmer, a certified auditor who also worked at Credit Suisse and KPMG, had argued Swiss bank secrecy should not apply, since the documents he leaked referred to accounts in Cayman.

Swiss bank secrecy has come under global attack in recent years, with neighboring Germany buying secret data from informants in a bid to track down tax evaders.

[WaTcHeR]

eywords: Wikileaks

Although U.S. Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., the chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, wants WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, to be added to a special government list of entities and individuals that includes terrorist groups and drug trafficking organizations, the Treasury Department has reportedly declined to do so. King called Wikileaks a "clear and present threat to U.S. national interests," in a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

King sent the letter on Wednesday, asking that Assange and WikiLeaks be added to the department's "Specially Designated National and Blocked Persons List," also known as the SDN List. The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which publishes the SDN List, describes the entities on the list "as individuals and companies owned or controlled by, or acting for or on behalf of, targeted countries . . . [as well as] individuals, groups, and entities, such as terrorists and narcotics traffickers designated under programs that are not country-specific."

On Friday afternoon, a Treasury spokesperson told The Hill that it would not do as King had asked. "We do not have evidence at this time as to Julian Assange or WikiLeaks meeting criteria under which OFAC may designate persons and place them on the SDN list," according to the news site.

The ramifications for those on the SDN List can be significant. According to the Treasury Department's website, the government generally prohibits U.S. persons from dealing with entities on the SDN List and also blocks the assets of those on the list.

King's letter stated that he aims to "prohibit any company or person subject to U.S. jurisdiction from conducting any business with Assange or Wikileaks." Referencing business transactions that Wikileaks or Assange have had with U.S. companies, King's letter also said that the government "should be doing all it can to sink Wikileaks. By adding Assange and Wikileaks to the SDN List, the United States can finally take action to dismantle his organization."

A press release attributed to WikiLeaks took issue with King's letter. "WikiLeaks is a publishing organization," the press release quotes Assange as stating. "It is time to cut through the bluster. There is no allegation by the U.S. government, or any other party, that WikiLeaks has hurt anyone, at any time, during its four-year publishing history, as a result of anything it has published. Very few news organizations can say as much."

King's letter follows similar requests to other cabinet members last year. In November, King called on Attorney General Eric Holder to prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act and requested that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton consider designating Wikileaks as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

[WaTcHeR]

The Internet service provider (ISP) hosting WikiLeaks' servers is fighting back against the European Data Retention Directive by running all customer traffic through an encrypted virtual private network (VPN) service before logging it.

The European Data Retention Directive, which was approved in 2006, aimed to identify the origin, time and means of communication for all Internet traffic to support investigations.

By anonymizing all traffic, not even WikiLeaks ISP Bahnhof will be able to see what customers are doing, making any such logs useless.

"In our case, we plan to let our traffic go through a VPN service," Bahnhof's Jon Karlung told SR. "Technically, this is a stealth section, we will store all data up to this point of invisibility."

"What happens after that is not our responsibility and is outside Bahnhof. So the only thing we are going to store is very little information, which in practice will be irrelevant," he added.

"Since the service will encrypt user traffic, not even Bahnhof will know what their customers are doing online," TorrentFreak noted. "If the ISP doesn’t know about their activities, then there’s not much to log. Nothing to log means there’s nothing useful to hand over to authorities and anti-piracy companies."

In 2009, Bahnhof thwarted Sweden's Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) by ceasing to log customer traffic at all. IPRED allowed copyright holders the ability to request personal details for alleged offenders.

Under implementation of the European Data Retention Directive, logs were once again required -- so the company decided to take new measures to protect their customers.

A recent study of German police statistics found that the European Data Retention Directive was "ineffective" in fighting serious crime.

Sweden's plan to require ISPs to retain information was driven by US business interests, according to a US State Department cable from March 2009, revealed late last year by WikiLeaks.

Another cable, detailing a communique from April 2009, revealed that US business interests also played a role in the passage of a French law that created Internet user blacklists, ostensibly to be used against people who accessed copyrighted content online. The movie and music industry groups MPAA and RIAA suggested the move was key to their anti-piracy efforts.

[KC]

WASHINGTON — A US judge ordered Twitter to hand over data of three users in contact with the controversial website WikiLeaks, rejecting arguments the move violated freedom of speech and privacy.

President Barack Obama's administration obtained a court order last year seeking information from the Twitter accounts as it considers action against WikiLeaks, which has released a flood of secret diplomatic documents.

One of the accounts belongs to an Icelandic lawmaker, Birgitta Jonsdottir. Iceland's foreign ministry in January summoned the US ambassador to express "serious concern" about the Twitter order.

Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan, based in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia, rejected the argument made by the three Twitter users' that the order would have a "chilling effect" on freedom of speech.

"The Twitter order does not seek to control or direct the content of petitioners' speech or association," she wrote.

She said the three "already made their Twitter posts and associations publicly available" and voluntarily provided information to Twitter pursuant to the website's privacy policy.

Buchanan also dismissed the argument that the order violated the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects people against "unreasonable" searches.

When the trio relayed information to Twitter, they gave up "any reasonable expectation of privacy," she said.

WikiLeaks, which has strongly criticized the order, said that three Twitter users never worked for the site but that two helped make public a video that showed a 2007 US helicopter strike in Baghdad that killed several people.

The footage appeared to show the Apache pilots mistaking a camera carried by an employee of the Reuters news agency as a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

WikiLeaks has since angered US authorities by posting secret documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and releasing a slew of internal correspondence among US diplomats around the world.

Aden Fine of the American Civil Liberties Union, the rights advocacy group which defended the Twitter users, said they planned to appeal.

"This is not the last word," Fine said.

"This decision gives the government the ability to obtain private information about Internet communication in secret, except in extraordinary circumstances," he said.

"That's not how our judicial system works and it shouldn't have been permitted here," he said.

Fine said the Twitter users planned to take the case to a district judge. Buchanan is a magistrate, a type of legal officer who generally helps courts prepare for trials.

Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation which also backed the legal challenge, said that in an era in which third parties hold so much digital information, "the government can track your every move and statement without you ever having a chance to protect yourself."

Besides Jonsdottir, the Twitter accounts belong to US computer researcher Jacob Appelbaum and Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch volunteer for WikiLeaks.

Buchanan rejected calls to drop the order in light of Jonsdottir's position as a foreign lawmaker.

The order "does not seek information on parliamentary affairs in Iceland, or any of Ms. Jonsdottir's parliamentary acts. Her status as a member of parliament is merely incidental to this investigation," she wrote.

The decision came amid growing controversy over the conditions in custody of Bradley Manning, 23, the soldier suspected of releasing the data to WikiLeaks.

In a letter released Thursday, Manning said that he was treated improperly at the Quantico military base in Virginia, including being stripped at night.

The State Department's chief spokesman, Philip Crowley, was quoted as telling a forum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that the treatment of Manning was "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid."

Obama told reporters he had inquired about Manning's treatment and that the Pentagon assured him it was "appropriate."




http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/11/t ... ata-to-us/