FBI Got Access To Sci-Hub Founder's Apple Account
from the how-dare-people-get-academic-papers-without-paying! dept
The war against educating people without paying huge sums of money continues without pause. Over the last few years, we've written a bunch about Sci-Hub and its founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, including the fact that academic publishers have convinced the DOJ to investigate Elbakyan, claiming that this effort to (*checks notes*) give more academics free access to academic articles is... tied to Russian intelligence. The whole thing seemed bizarre. Sure, fine, people can make arguments about copyright -- but saying that it's connected to Russian intelligence seems like quite a conspiracy theory.
Either way, it appears that the "investigation" continues along. TorrentFreak alerts us that Apple has informed Elbakyan that the FBI now has access to her Apple account. She tweeted about the notification recently:
received a few minutes ago to my GMail. at first I thought it was a spam and was about to delete the email, but it turned out to be about FBI requesting my data from Apple pic.twitter.com/rbWMLGtGcp
— Alexandra Elbakyan (@ringo_ring) May 7, 2021
It does seem notable that the FBI subpoena to Apple took place back in early 2019 and Apple is only just now telling Elbakyan about it. At the very least, that suggests that the subpoena came with a fairly typical gag order not to alert the person being investigated. The fact that Apple now is free to alert her would seem to suggest that whatever gag order has ended. What that means for the investigation, though, is not at all clear (though, normally, you wouldn't think that the FBI would give up the gag order before the investigation ended).
It's also unclear what might be in that Apple account -- and what the FBI might have access too. While Apple regularly touts the (important) encryption on the phone, that does not mean that everything backed up to an iCloud account is encrypted. Much of it may not be.
If there actually was credible evidence of involvement with Russian intelligence, it wouldn't be that surprising that this subpoena happened, but without more information, it also looks like the FBI working over time for greedy private publishers who still can't stand that people might want academic papers without having to pay their extortionate prices.
Filed Under: academic research, alexandra elbakyan, apple account, fbi, subpoena
Companies: apple
