MANHATTAN (CN) - Fourteen years have passed since the newsroom Irina Petrushova ran in Kazakhstan was firebombed - shortly after she found the corpse of a decapitated dog at the office and its head outside her house - but threats against the journalist remain ongoing.
With her publication Respublika long barred from newsstands and computer screens in Kazakhstan, Petrushova lives in exile, part of a cadre of dissident journalists now relying on social media to thwart government censors.
Not to be outwitted by this new platform, however, Kazakhstan took its intimidation campaign to U.S. courts and Silicon Valley early last year after a massive leak of emails implicated corruption at the highest levels of the Kazakh government.
Respublika joined the ranks of more than a dozen international news outlets that reported on the leak, while Kazakhstan bandied the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as a means of identifying the alleged hackers.
Kazakhstan's pursuit of these unidentified "John Does" meanwhile has enabled attorneys for the former Soviet republic to cast a wider net - subpoenaing dissident journalists, publishers, Facebook and Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom as part of the global manhunt.
A New York federal judge found that he had jurisdiction to hear the case because the leaked emails contained communications between Kazakh officials and their attorneys at the Manhattan firm Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle.
Giving an exclusive interview on the heels of a nine-hour deposition for the case, Petrushova said she realized Respublika reporters were being targeted when their Internet hosting company received court papers.
"Only after that, we were wise that they're going not after hackers, they're going after us," said Petrushova, speaking on Skype through a Russian interpreter.
Numbering in the tens of thousands, the government emails that appeared on the web portal Kazaword on Jan. 21, 2015, ranged from the explosive to the merely embarrassing.
The communications shed light on a $1 billion merger between Kazakhstan's two largest banks, extravagant spending by government officials, and international collaboration in suppressing dissent.
Respublika used the emails to confirm that the country's longtime strongman, Nursultan Nazarbayev, paid more than $105,000 for three letters by Napoleon Bonaparte.
The Kazakh autocrat also collaborated with senior Russian and Ukrainian authorities to persecute a dissident politician, Respublika reported.
Other outlets inside Kazakhstan, which ranks 160 out of 180 in the most recent press-freedom index published by Reporters Without Borders, did not take heed of the revelations.
"Nobody's discussing it because Respublika is a different newspaper," Petrushova said. "It's free of censorship."
A little more than a week Kazakhstan filed its New York suit, U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos granted the country a sweeping preliminary injunction, barring the publication and dissemination of the "stolen materials."
Civil society groups such as the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that the ruling could set a "dangerous precedent" for undemocratic countries to suppress their dissidents.
At their urging, Judge Ramos scaled back his order to emphasize a fundamental tenet of constitutional law. "The First Amendment grants persons a near absolute right to publish truthful information about matters of public interest that they lawfully acquire," he wrote.
The journalist's translator, fellow Respublika staffer Alexey Tikhonov, chimed in at this point to explain what promise Facebook made when the New York-based advocacy Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) sent a delegation of journalists to Silicon Valley in September 2011.
In power 25 years, Nazarbayev has enjoyed a complicated but profitable alliance with the United States, which looks to its vast reserves of Caspian Sea oil to wean its energy sector off OPEC nations.
As the case against Giffen progressed, then-president George W. Bush reportedly welcomed unindicted co-conspirator Nazarbayev to the White House and his family's compound in Kennebunkport, Maine.
