On Friday, two Icelandic activists with previous connections to WikiLeaks announced that they received newly unsealed court orders from Google. Google sent the orders earlier in the week, revealing that the company searched and seized data from their Gmail accounts—likely as a result of a grand jury investigation into the rogue whistleblower group.
Google was forbidden under American law from disclosing these orders to the men until the court lifted this restriction in early May 2013. (A Google spokesperson referred Ars to its Transparency Report for an explanation of its policies.)
On June 21, 2013, well-known Irish-Icelandic developer Smári McCarthy published his recently un-sealed court order dating back to July 14, 2011. Google sent him the order, which included McCarthy's Gmail account metadata, the night before. The government cited the Stored Communications Act (SCA)(specifically a 2703(d) order) as grounds to provide this order.
Meanwhile, Herbert Snorrason received a D-order dated from May 2011 for the metadata and a search warrant (citing 2703(f) of the SCA) for “the contents of all e-mails associated with the account, including stored or preserved copies of e-mails sent to and from the account, draft e-mails, deleted e-mails…the source and destination addresses associated with each e-mail, the date and time at which each e-mail was sent, and the size and length of each e-mail.”
Snorrason, according to Wired, helped “manage WikiLeaks’ secure chat room in 2010 but later left in protest in September 2010." The northwestern Icelander confirmed to Ars that he served in this role for "approximately two months in 2010."
“Thankfully, neither of us use our Google accounts for anything remotely sensitive,” McCarthy wrote on his blog on Friday.
Under the federal statute that allows for the D-order, authorities can’t receive the contents of electronic communication but can find out where and to whom it was said. In contemporary cases from the last decade, law enforcement and judges have increasingly used this reasoning to acquire all kinds of metadata on digital communications that previously required a much higher legal threshold—a probable cause-driven warrant.
“We know the government gets warrants for e-mail access pretty frequently and it’s a good thing that they’re getting warrants and not [just] D-orders, which is something we wanted them to shift to for a long time,” said Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “To me, without seeing the affidavit, it looks like they got all e-mails. That’s a pretty broad request, notwithstanding that they got a warrant.”
“Do I have no rights, not being a US citizen?”
Snorrason spoke with Ars and echoed McCarthy's position, speaking out against such judicial orders issued under seal.
“Really, I think the most important thing here is getting people to realize that this madness is going on,” Snorrason told Ars. “All my details, just because I talked to an 'undesirable?' Do I have no rights, not being a US citizen?”
Snorrason elaborated on this idea in a blog post:
That’s rather a lot of information. Particularly in light of the fact that I’m not allowed to know why they’re asking for this information. I assume it’s because I had a conversation or a few with a white-haired Australian guy, but there’s nothing in the documents to confirm this. Let’s reiterate this, because that’s the point I find the most remarkable in all of this: Because I talked to Julian Assange, all information held by Google relating to my user account with them can be handed over to US prosecutors—not just the contents of my conversations with Julian.
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