A month ago, Google said it does not publicly address individual cases when it comes to government requests for customer data "to help protect all our users."

But on Wednesday, Google changed course after being ripped for failing to notify WikiLeaks that three years ago, Google handed over data to federal authorities about three staffers of the secret-spilling site as part of the government's espionage probe of the site and its founder, Julian Assange. The reason for the three-year delay, Google said, was because it had been under a gag order that it was fighting.

"From January 2011 to the present, Google has continued to fight to lift the gag orders on any legal process it has received on WikiLeaks," Al Gidari, a Google lawyer told The Washington Post. He said the media giant's policy is to always challenge indefinite gag orders. The gags on these were partly lifted, he said.

Further Reading WikiLeaks claims employee’s Google mail, metadata seized by US government [Updated]

Google notified WikiLeaks staffers Sarah Harrison, Kristinn Hrafnsson, and Joseph Farrell about the warrants on December 23. The three-year delay prompted the trio's attorneys to lash out at Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman.

"We are astonished and disturbed that Google waited over two and a half years to notify its subscribers," they wrote (PDF) to the chairman Monday. The lawyers did not immediately respond for comment on whether they were satisfied with Google's response Wednesday.



That's not the only time Google had fought a gag in the WikiLeaks probe. In 2011, Google informed WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum that the authorities also sought his information connected to his e-mail.

The government's WikiLeaks investigation began in 2010, after WikiLeaks distributed tens of thousands of US secrets obtained by Chelsea Manning, an Army private sentenced to 35 years in prison after being convicted of espionage and other charges.

Assange said the search warrants were a "serious, and seriously wrong attempt to build an alleged 'conspiracy' case against me and my staff." Part of that conspiracy, he told The Guardian, was "Google rolling over yet again to help the US government violate the Constitution—by taking over journalists' private e-mails in response to give-us-everything warrants."

Google said in a statement that "when we receive a subpoena or court order, we check to see if it meets both the letter and the spirit of the law before complying. And if it doesn't we can object or ask that the request is narrowed. We have a track record of advocating on behalf of our users."

Assange has taken up residence in the Embassy of Ecuador in London and has been granted political asylum.