Lavely & Singer demonstrate how not to protect the confidentiality of customers of Bank Julius Baer
Evan Spiegel, of Hollywood media celebrity vanity lawyers Lavely & SInger has filed a couple of extraordinarily inept Exhibits which were somehow supposed to counter the amicus curiae brief and the Motion to Intervene briefs in the Bank Julius Baer versus Wikileaks case..
See the Electronic Frontier Foundation's copy of Decl. of Evan Spiegel in Support of Plaintiff's Supplement Brief in Support of Application for Preliminary Injunction (.pdf )
Attached hereto as Exhibit "B" is a true and correct copy of printouts from the Wikileaks Websites, an example, from many, evidencing content and extensive edits provided by Wikileaks.
Although this is a legal document submission in a court case, under a system which uses electronic filing of documents and submissions, which are then available to the public and the media for a small fee, and is therefore not a "leaked whistleblower document", the mistakes in redaction and censorship are relevant to such leaked documents.
Exhibit "B" is a supposedly a "true and correct
copy" of the WikiLeakS.org web page from which the alleged .zip file archive relating to Heinri Steinberger, and Bowsprit Investments Ltd can be downloaded (page 9) and also a highlighted printout of the associated wiki page revision history (page 10)
Current WikiLeakS.org versions of these pages:
- Heinri Steinberger leak introduction page - current version of Exhibit "B" page 9
- wiki edit history page - current version of Exhibit "B" page 10
These Wikileaks user labelled edits are only to the explanatory page,which includes a link to the actual This page (page 9) describes the nature of the leaked document, and also any caveats or warnings about its authenticity. Some of this information will have come via the document submission form which the anonymous whistleblower filled in, and some will be commentary and/or language translation, provided by one or more WikiLeakS.org volunteers with privileged access to the system.
This wiki edit history page is not evidence of any editing or amendment of the actual leak documents in the compressed .zip file archive. It is not even evidence that anybody has actually opened the archive and ever read any of the alleged documents.
As it happens, some of the documents within this particular .zip archive, the Microsoft Word .doc files, rather than the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet files, have the Hidden bit set, so there is no guarantee that casual readers of this page will have seen and read all of the allegedly private information, which, according to Lavely & Singer may or may not be authentic or forged, in any case.
This Exhibit "B" appears to be an image scan of a printout out of an online web page, which has been incompetently redacted, with black marker pen, and then image scanned back into electronic .pdf file format, How can this be be sworn and attested to be a "true copy" ?
Extraordinarily, someone has attempted to hide the name Heinri Steinberger from the explanatory notes text about the leaked document, both in English and in the longer version in German.
They have also tried to do the same where the name is part of the computer file name and / or URL web page link.
Incredibly on page 9 of the Exhibit "B" they have not censored or redacted the actual postal address ("Freiherr von Stein 16, 60000, Frankfurt 70") of this supposedly highly confidential Bank Julius Baer client.
By not actually censoring the tail of the lower case "g" in Steinberger and by not properly blacking out either the text, or all of the surrounding white space, this could easily let people guess the words or names which are being censored or redacted.
However, even such guesswork is unnecessary, as on th next page, page 10 of the Exhibit "B", the printout from the WikiLeakS.org wiki page history revisions audit trail, the name appears in extra large text in the title of this page !
"BJB - Heinri Steinberger, Frankfurt Steurbetrug EUR 15 mil"
"Steuerbetrug" means "tax fraud or tax evasion", i.e. an illegal activity, rather than legal tax avoidance or tax management.
"EUR 15 mil" mean 15 million Euros (currently about 22.5 million US dollar))
Is this how Lavely & Singer are protecting the clients of Bank Julius Baer, by repeating the allegations of illegal activity in Court documents which are submitted electronically, and which are available to the public and the media for a small fee ?
Will Lavely & Singer now try to censor all the legal document databases and websites which will have copies of these Court documents ?
The highlighting of the username "Wikileaks" in this page revision history printout seems to be of interest to the Bank Julius Baer / Lavely & Singer lawyers, but it does not constitute proof that any particular person actually edited or uploaded a particular whistleblower leak document.
There could be, and probably are, several different people with administrative access tot he system, whose actions are date and time stamped as the "Wikileaks: user account name.
Some of these entries could be from the automatic anonymous submission queue system, which claims to have now, or which it is intended to have in the future, the facility to randomly delay the time of publication, to help frustrate Communications Data Traffic analysis snooping on leak submitters.
Since the original is actually a web page, this could have been more securely redacted by, for example, editing a copy of the file or image electronically, and replacing the words or letters to be censored with asterisks, before printing it out or pasting it back into the electronic .pdf file document for electronic submission, In this case the electronic submission was to the California Federal Court, but the same applies to sending such a file to WikiLeakS.org or to any other whistleblower channel, such as a mainstream print or broadcast journalists.