The federal government confirmed that it is still investigating Wikileaks and has asked the judicial branch to keep its probe secret because of fear over public opinion, according to The Washington Post.
US officials have repeatedly sought to fight transparency over the matter because they were embarrassed after the existence of one of its first subpoenas in the case was revealed, the Post reported on Wednesday.
Albert Gidari, a lawyer representing Google, told the paper that the tech giant wanted to inform Wikileaks-affiliate and data security expert Jacob Appelbaum of the existence of a January 2011 subpoena for his data, but federal prosecutors said that they would “fight you forever.”
Prosecutors, he alleged, were and still are pushing back against interested parties’ moves toward disclosure because of a backlash that followed Twitter’s revelations about a December 2010 subpoena against Appelbaum and four others, including Icelandic Parliamentarian, Birgitta Jonsdottir.
“The US attorney’s office thought the notice and the resulting publicity was a disaster for them,” Gidari said. The Perkins Coie partner added that federal prosecutors at the US Attorney’s Office in Alexandria, Va. “went through the roof” after the name of assistant US Attorney Tracy Doherty-McCormick was published.
A spokesperson for the federal prosecutor’s office did not respond to The Post’s request for comment because the investigation of Wikileaks is ongoing, the spokesperson said. Gidari said that Google is still fighting gag orders on subpoenas “to the present.”
Google’s lawyer spoke to The Post after Wikileaks hit out at the company on Monday. The Silicon Valley corporation revealed on Dec. 23 that it was, about thirty months prior, subject to search warrants for three Wikileaks staffers’ emails.
“We are astonished and disturbed that Google waited over two and a half years to notify its subscribers,” Michael Ratner, a lawyer representing the Wikileaks staffers said in a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Google eventually was allowed to let Appelbaum in on the existence of the order in the autumn of 2011.
Although many orders remain under seal, other former Wikileaks volunteers were also informed by Google of subpoenas and search warrants for their data. As one Sentinel reporter detailed for The Nation in June 2013, Google revealed the existence of federal agents’ orders for sensitive data belonging to two Icelandic freedom of information activists, Smari McCarthy and Herbert Snorrason. The August 2011 order called for metadata about the pair’s user names, chat logs, and IP addresses. A search warrant was executed in October 2011 against Google for the contents and metadata of Snorrason’s email. McCarthy also said he was approached by plainclothes FBI agents in May 2012 late at night at the Archives-Navy Memorial Metro stop in Washington, DC, during a business trip.
“It was very disconcerting,” he said. “It was clear from the fact that they found me there and then that they had been following me, possibly for as much as five days, waiting for me to be alone.”
Wikileaks had established a base in Iceland by 2010, the year in which it published the most explosive classified and secret documents and information about US government national security state activities.
The ongoing federal case against the website has been blasted by civil liberties advocates. The American Civil Liberties Union said that if the US government does decide to prosecute Wikileaks, it would almost certainly violate the freedom of the press.
“We’re deeply skeptical that prosecuting WikiLeaks would be constitutional, or a good idea,” ACLU National Security Project director Hina Shamsi said in December 2010. “The courts have made clear that the First Amendment protects independent third parties who publish classified information. Prosecuting WikiLeaks would be no different from prosecuting the media outlets that also published classified documents. If newspapers could be held criminally liable for publishing leaked information about government practices, we might never have found out about the CIA’s secret prisons or the government spying on innocent Americans.”
