Has IIPM committed perjury?

The plot in L'Affaire IIPM thickens. The "IIPM Legal Cell" emailed Blogger Varna Shri Raman a legal notice that was a virtual copy of the mail sent to Gaurav Sabnis last week. Among other things, it said:

Warning: This email has been judicially notarized and has been tagged to validate receipt and response

and

Be warned, your telephone numbers, physical addresses thereon, login details, network access mechanisms have all been documented, notarized and legally ratified through google and blogspot.com, thus ensuring that any arrest warrants can be served and implemented on you within one day.

Now, giving the IIPM blokes the benefit of the doubt, I'll assume that they were telling the truth about the judicial notarisation. However, as a TechMag article by Thejesh GN says, the second statement does not seem very likely. For, as Thejesh notes, Google's privacy statement precludes such a disclosure. Google's privacy statement says they will only release your information if:

· We (Google) have your consent.

· We provide such information to trusted businesses or persons for the sole purpose of processing personally identifying information on our behalf. When this is done, it is subject to agreements that oblige those parties to process such information only on our instructions and in compliance with this Privacy Policy and appropriate confidentiality and security measures.

· We conclude that we are required by law or have a good faith belief that access, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public.

Now Google cannot possibly have had Gaurav's and Varna's permission to give their account information to IIPM. Nor could there have been a legal requirement, because a no court would issue the requisite subpoena on such flimsy grounds. And we can be sure that Google did not have a good faith belief that releasing the data was necessary to preserve anyone's rights, property or safety.

Therefore, the IIPM are clearly lying about having obtained Gaurav and Varna's details through Google. So, the question is, isn't lying (and telling verifiable lies, at that) on a judicially notarised email perjury?

(Technorati tag: IIPM)