Declan McCullagh reports:
The U.S. Department of Justice has expanded its investigation of WikiLeaks-related accounts to encompass Google and Internet provider Sonic.net.
Both companies received secret court orders directing them to turn over information from the e-mail account of Jacob Appelbaum, a hacker and human rights activist who has been affiliated with WikiLeaks, the Wall Street Journal reported this evening.
CNET has learned that the secret court order is what’s called a 2703(d) order.
Read more on CNET. It seems that the Google order was issued at the same time as the Twitter order that was covered extensively on this blog and elsewhere. At the time, most people suspected that Google would have received such an order, but Google did not – and has as yet, not – confirmed that.
Sonic.net reportedly fought the government and lost. Good for them for fighting this. But now I’m wondering about their August blog post about two-week data retention of IP logs. Was that a change for them after the order or were they only retaining two weeks’ of IP logs at the time they received the order? In any event, their experience is a timely reminder to businesses as to why not to retain data for longer than you really need it for your business purposes.