Launching a protest against search giant Google, open information group WikiLeaks wrote a letter to the company seeking clarification over why they took almost three years to disclose about the sharing of information, emails and other digital data belonging to three of WikiLeaks staffers to the US government.
WikiLeaks lawyer Michael Ratner sent a letter to Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt expressing disappointment over the revelation of the warrants to FBI in December.
According to reports, Google had received a secret search warrant from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in March 2012 seeking information about three Wikileaks employees. But the search giant informed Wikileaks about the FBI demand in December only.
Now, Wikileaks has asked Google about the details of the information shared with the federal agency at that time. Also, it wants to know whether Google has received any more requests since then.
According to Google, the FBI sought email content, metadata and many more.
“We are astonished and disturbed that Google waited over two and a half years to notify its subscribers that a search warrant was issued for their records,” according to the letter.
Google has told Wikileaks that the information that was requested by FBI was associated with the investigations related to f WikiLeaks editor, Sarah Harrison, senior editor Joseph Farrell and their spokesperson, Kristinn Hrafnsson.
“Neither Google nor the US government are living up to their own laws or rhetoric in privacy or press protections,” Sarah Harrison said.
Google clarified Wikileaks of not informing them about the data sharing because of the gag order.
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