The U.S. government’s investigation against WikiLeaks and its supporters went beyond its efforts to obtain data from Twitter. A new report reveals that the government also used secret orders to obtain information from Google and internet service provider Sonic.net pertaining to the accounts of U.S.-based, former WikiLeaks spokesman Jacob Appelbaum.

The orders, issued last January for Google and in April for Sonic, remained secret until Sonic succeeded to convince a court to lift the seal on its order so that Appelbaum could be informed about it, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The order...

Charles Darwin was a poetic naturalist. The final passage of his 1859 book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection illustrates this best of all. Who would have thought that all the complex beauty of “an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth” could have been created by the perpetual “war of nature”? The great truth and paradox of nature was that competition, death, and extinction were directly tied to the origin of what Darwin felicitously descri...