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The Obama administration fought a legal battle against Google to secretly obtain the email records of a security researcher and journalist associated with WikiLeaks. Newly unsealed court documents obtained by The Intercept reveal the Justice Department won an order forcing Google to turn over more than one year’s worth of data from the Gmail account of Jacob Appelbaum (pictured above), a developer for the Tor online anonymity project who has worked with WikiLeaks as a volunteer. The order also gagged Google, preventing it from notifying Appelbaum that his records had been provided to the government. The surveillance of Appelbaum’s Gmail account was tied to the Justice Department’s long-running criminal investigation of WikiLeaks, which began in 2010 following the transparency group’s publication of a large cache of U.S. government diplomatic cables. According to the unsealed documents, the Justice Department first sought details from Google about a Gmail account operated by Appelbaum in January 2011, triggering a three-month dispute between the government and the tech giant. Government investigators demanded metadata records from the account showing email addresses of those with whom Appelbaum had corresponded between the period of November 2009 and early 2011; they also wanted to obtain information showing the unique IP addresses of the computers he had used to log in to the account.

The Justice Department argued in the case that Appelbaum had “no reasonable expectation of privacy” over his email records under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. Rather than seeking a search warrant that would require it to show probable cause that he had committed a crime, the government instead sought and received an order to obtain the data under a lesser standard, requiring only “reasonable grounds” to believe that the records were “relevant and material” to an ongoing criminal investigation. Google repeatedly attempted to challenge the demand, and wanted to immediately notify Appelbaum that his records were being sought so he could have an opportunity to launch his own legal defense. Attorneys for the tech giant argued in a series of court filings that the government’s case raised “serious First Amendment concerns.” They noted that Appelbaum’s records “may implicate journalistic and academic freedom” because they could “reveal confidential sources or information about WikiLeaks’ purported journalistic or academic activities.” However, the Justice Department asserted that “journalists have no special privilege to resist compelled disclosure of their records, absent evidence that the government is acting in bad faith,” and refused to concede Appelbaum was in fact a journalist. It claimed it had acted in “good faith throughout this criminal investigation, and there is no evidence that either the investigation or the order is intended to harass the … subscriber or anyone else.” Google’s attempts to fight the surveillance gag order angered the government, with the Justice Department stating that the company’s “resistance to providing the records” had “frustrated the government’s ability to efficiently conduct a lawful criminal investigation.”

The Justice Department wanted to keep the surveillance secret largely because of an earlier public backlash over its WikiLeaks investigation. In January 2011, Appelbaum and other WikiLeaks volunteers’ – including Icelandic parlimentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir – were notified by Twitter that the Justice Department had obtained data about their accounts. This disclosure generated widepread news coverage and controversy; the government says in the unsealed court records that it “failed to anticipate the degree of  damage that would be caused” by the Twitter disclosure and did not want to “exacerbate this problem” when it went after Appelbaum’s Gmail data. The court documents show the Justice Department said the disclosure of its Twitter data grab “seriously jeopardized the [WikiLeaks] investigation” because it resulted in efforts to “conceal evidence” and put public pressure on other companies to resist similar surveillance orders. It also claimed that officials named in the subpeona ordering Twitter to turn over information were “harassed” after a copy was published by Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald at Salon in 2011. (The only specific evidence of the alleged harassment cited by the government is an email that was sent to an employee of the U.S. Attorney’s office that purportedly said: “You guys are fucking nazis trying to controll [sic] the whole fucking world. Well guess what. WE DO NOT FORGIVE. WE DO NOT FORGET. EXPECT US.”)

The investigation discloses the following: Two servers in Germany - in Berlin and Nuremberg - are under surveillance by the NSA. Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the person doing the search. Not only are German privacy software users tracked, but the source code shows that privacy software users worldwide are tracked by the NSA.Among the NSA's targets is the Tor network funded primarily by the US government to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states.  The XKeyscore rules reveal that the NSA tracks all connections to a server that hosts part of an anonymous email service at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It also records details about visits to a popular internet journal for Linux operating system users called "the Linux Journal - the Original Magazine of the Linux Community", and calls it an "extremist forum".

Three authors of this investigation have personal and professional ties to the Tor Project, an American company mentioned within the following investigation.

Teil 1: NSA targets the privacy-conscious Teil 2: The Tor Project - anathema to the NSA Teil 3: Servers in Germany targeted Teil 4: Simple web searches are suspicious Teil 5: NSA: In strict accordance with the rule of law

Top experts say there could be a new person leaking details about the National Security Agency, in addition to former contractor Edward Snowden.Glenn Greenwald, the journalist most closely associated to Snowden, said he suspects someone else has been involved in leaking out new documents, and other experts have backed up the claim.ADVERTISEMENTThe existence of a second leaker “seems clear at this point,” Greenwald wrote on Twitter over the weekend. “The lack of sourcing to Snowden on this & that last [Der Spiegel] article seems petty telling,” he added, after German broadcasters reported that the NSA was tracking people searching for details about privacy software. 

Neither the Der Spiegel article from December nor last week’s story, both of which were partly written by privacy advocate and security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, specifically mentioned that the information emanated from leaks by Snowden.“That's particularly notable given that virtually every other article using Snowden documents - including der Spiegel - specifically identified him as the source,” Greenwald said in an email to The Hill on Monday.Other people who have seen Snowden’s trove of documents have agreed that the documents revealed by German outlets seem to indicate a second source.

Bruce Schneier, a cryptologist and cybersecurity expert who has helped the Guardian review Snowden’s disclosures, said he did “not believe that this came from the Snowden documents.”“I think there’s a second leaker out there,” he wrote in a blog post last week. If true, it could add another headache for the NSA, which has struggled for more than a year to contain the fallout from Snowden’s revelations. Defenders of the NSA say that the disclosures have hurt U.S. security and empowered terrorists and other enemies abroad.Among other internal reforms, the spy agency has beefed up its clearance procedures to prevent another employee from passing along secret documents to journalists or governments in Beijing and Moscow.