Wow. Just. Wow. As part of the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling killing the John Doe investigation, the court ordered the prosecutors to tell everyone they had investigated what they had taken as part of the investigation.
As it turns out, virtually every prominent conservative activist in the state was being secretly investigated. Brian Fraley reacts to the news here:
Well, what do you know. The soon-to-be-history Government Accountability Board and their hackneyed John Doe investigation of Wisconsin conservatives had me in their sights all along.
Yesterday, my former employer let me know that disgraced former Special Prosecutor Francis Schmitz sent me a letter informing me that four years of my emails, online calendar, and all documents stored in the Google Drive cloud had been seized during the John Doe witch hunt.
Included in these emails are pdfs of my tax returns.
All my online passwords.
All my personal health records and those of my oldest daughter.
Credit card and banking statements.
In short, they sought and (thanks to a Judge who didn’t scrutinize the request) they received everything emailed by or to me for nearly four years. All over a suspected violation of campaign finance law, which has subsequently been determined by the court to be based on a flawed interpretation of state law.
There are others. Consider the utter lawlessness and intrusiveness of this. It’s like something out of North Korea. Citizens who had done nothing wrong had years worth of personal data collected and sifted through by government officials without ever even notifying the victims that they were being investigated. And, to keep it in perspective, we aren’t talking about an investigation of the Mafia here. We’re talking about people possibly coordinating political activities – something that was never a crime.
The legislature chose to reform instead of scrap the John Doe laws in Wisconsin. They should revisit that decision. Prosecutors should not have so much power to operate in secrecy.
Don’t people get thrown in jail for hacking corporate/government email?
We should treat these Democrat hack(er)s the same way.
I know Brian reads this blog, so I’m wondering if he can clear a couple things up. Was Brian unaware that the prosecutor and GAB had all these personal documents until just the other day?
Were these records they got from the MacIver server/archives? And had MacIver turned these over to the GAB/prosecutors? If so, why didn’t they (MacIver) notify Brian or were they not allowed to?
This whole thing sounds ridiculous and horrifying. Think that idiot George Stanley over at MJS wrote the wrong editorial this morning. Should have been on this terrible abuse.
Didn’t know. MacIver didn’t know although prosecutor was supposed to detail all he has and how it was obtained and from whom, he did not. Only left to assumption secret warrant was served upon Google on 10/19/13.
Brian-thanks for the reply.
That’s amazing. So the prosecutor went direct to google and got into all your google mail accounts? How did he even know you used Google mail and docs or did he have to go on a fishing expedition and serve those same warrants on Yahoo, Hotmail, etc to see if he could find something?
In some ways your story is almost worse than the home raids. We just need to get this stuff out. Is there a public list of all the people they did this to?
Steve, here’s the thing. I don’t know. The prosecutor was supposed to tell all of us what he has and how he got it. He did not comply with that Court order.
Owen is right with his comparison to North Korea…this is what liberalism looks like in practice. It’s ugly, destructive, and a complete assault on basic human rights.
Brian–heard you on Sykes this morning so I now get it.
I’d like to see a push to make these guys release all 159 or whatever names of people whose personal records they secretly downloaded and examined. Think it very beneficial to get that list made public and make sure the people of Wisconsin understand what was done here.
I’d like to then see the GOP do a commercial on this. Chisholm and the Milwaukee Journal should be damn ashamed of what they’ve done here. Makes Watergate look like a second rate burglary. Stunning abuse of power.
Some parallels when Hillary got the 900 secret FBI files on top GOP politicians and had it spread out all over the White House dining room table. She should have gone to jail for that.
Fraley is quite misinformed about the nature of IP addresses and geolocation. I’ve posted an extensive comment at his blog. Let’s see if he releases it.
Are we to believe that the Jodphur Brothers weren’t in the net?
If they didn’t want the geolocation info, why did they demand the IP info for every time my email was accessed? (By the way, at that time my email was automatically pushed to my smartphone every 5 minutes). They were fishing. You have to check the net to discover what you caught.
They wanted the IP info so they could run a quick cross reference with the IP address of that secret router in Walker’s office. Or if Brian was on the same computers of any of the other evil conservatives working for the election/re-election of Scott Walker. They probably have the IP address the Koch brothers use for their IPAD’s at home. That’s why I’d demand the list of all 159 be made public.
Again this is really bad. If the Walker administration had secretly grabbed all the emails and personal data of Chris Larson or Lena Taylor, we’d have a scandal that the MJS would be running in 72 point font right now across the top fold.