fbi – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Criminals Are Still Using Bogus Law Enforcement Subpoenas To Obtain Users’ Info

from the abusing-the-same-tools-the-cops-abuse dept

Maybe if law enforcement didn’t abuse subpoenas so frequently, it might be a little bit more difficult for criminals to do the same thing. Subpoenas can be used to order companies and service providers to turn over user data and information. But they don’t require law enforcement to run this request past a court first, so subpoenas are the weapon of choice if investigators just don’t have the probable cause they need to actually obtain a warrant.

The FBI has a long history of abusing its subpoena power, crafting National Security Letters to obtain information it thinks it might not be able to acquire if it allowed a court to review the request. In fact, FBI investigators have been known to send out NSLs demanding the same info requested by their rejected warrant applications.

Most companies don’t have the time or personnel to vet every subpoena they receive to ensure it’s legitimate and only demanding info or data that can be legally obtained without a warrant. As long as it originates from a law enforcement email address or has some sort of cop shop logo on it, they’ll probably comply.

This has led to several successful exfiltrations of personal data by cybercriminals. The latest wave of bogus subpoenas has apparently been effective enough, the FBI (which is part of the problem) has decided it’s time to step in. Here’s Zack Whittaker with the details for TechCrunch:

The FBI’s public notice filed this week is a rare admission from the federal government about the threat from fraudulent emergency data requests, a legal process designed to help police and federal authorities obtain information from companies to respond to immediate threats affecting someone’s life or property. The abuse of emergency data requests is not new, and has been widely reported in recent years. Now, the FBI warns that it saw an “uptick” around August in criminal posts online advertising access to or conducting fraudulent emergency data requests, and that it was going public for awareness.

“Cyber-criminals are likely gaining access to compromised US and foreign government email addresses and using them to conduct fraudulent emergency data requests to US based companies, exposing the personal information of customers to further use for criminal purposes,” reads the FBI’s advisory.

The full notice [PDF] gives more detail on how this is being accomplished, which involves utilizing data and personal info obtained through previous hacks or data leaks. Once a criminal has enough information to impersonate a cop, all they need is some easy-to-find subpoena boilerplate and a little bit of info about their targets. It also helps to know what might motivate faster responses while limiting the number of questions asked by service providers.

In some cases, the requests cited false threats, like claims of human trafficking and, in one case, that an individual would “suffer greatly or die” unless the company in question returns the requested information.

To combat this, the FBI suggests recipients of law enforcement subpoenas start doing the sort of thing they should have been doing all along, which is also the sort of thing that law enforcement agencies seem to consider being a low-level form of obstruction. Investigators tend to be “We’ll be asking the questions here” people and seem to resent even the most minimal pushback when engaging in fishing expeditions via subpoena.

Private Sector Companies receiving Law Enforcement requests should apply critical thinking to any emergency data requests received. Cyber-criminals understand the need for exigency, and use it to their advantage to shortcut the necessary analysis of the emergency data request. FBI recommends reviewers pay close attention to doctored images such as signatures or logos applied to the document. In addition, FBI recommends looking at the legal codes referenced in the emergency data request, as they should match what would be expected from the originating authority.

The rest of the notice tells law enforcement agencies to do all the basic security stuff they should have been doing all along to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening.

But what’s not suggested as a fix is one of the more obvious solutions: move away from utilizing subpoenas and rely on warrants instead. This will prevent service providers stepping into the role of magistrate judge when receiving subpoenas to determine whether the request is legitimate and is properly supported by existing law. It also will make it more difficult for cybercriminals to do little more than send emails from compromised accounts to fraudulently obtain user information. While it’s not impossible to forge court orders and warrants, it’s a bit more difficult than only having to impersonate a single person or law enforcement entity when sending bogus paperwork to tech companies.

Of course, no law enforcement agency would be willing to make this switch even if it meant protecting thousands of innocent people from being victimized by cybercriminals. Whatever makes things easier for cops to get what they want also makes it easier for criminals to do the same thing. If nothing else, maybe a few law enforcement officials will realize the parallels this has to mandating weakened encryption or encryption backdoors: what works better for cops works better for criminals.

Filed Under: cybercrime, fbi, privacy, security, subpoenas

The FBI Has Apparently Spent A Year Trying To Crack NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ Personal Phone

from the MAYOR-BEATS-FEDS dept

The spectacular collapse of the Mayor Adams’ administration is still in progress. Pretty much everyone with ties to the ex-cop, current mayor has either been informed of an ongoing investigation or managed to infer that following multiple raids by the FBI.

The mayor’s handpicked police commissioner, Edward Caban, resigned shortly after these raids occurred, most likely because he was on the receiving end of one of these raids. So were First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks, Phil Banks’ brother, David Banks, who is the schools chancellor, and Timothy Pearson, the mayor’s adviser.

Edward Caban issued a “get out of accountability free” missive to the NYPD as he left the building. He was replaced by former FBI Special Agent Michael Donlon… whose own house was also raided by the FBI.

In the middle of all this raiding and resigning, the Mayor’s PR people came forward to say the mayor was shocked, shocked! to discover there might be some sort of corruption-laden city government with himself at the center of all of it. The issued statement wasn’t quite the exoneration it was meant to be:

“As a former member of law enforcement, the mayor has repeatedly made clear that all members of the team need to follow the law.”

You know who doesn’t have to say that kind of thing repeatedly? Someone who oversees a bunch of people who have expressed no interest nor engaged in acts that might potentially violate the law. No honest politician/advisor/political appointee/police chief needs to be “repeatedly” reminded to “follow the law.” It just comes naturally to most people.

But Mayor Adams’ people are not most people. A lot of them are also former cops. Perhaps that explains all the corruption.

Mayor Adams himself isn’t immune to this ongoing investigation. In fact, he experienced his own personal raid a year before the onslaught of recent raids that have made headlines around the nation. Now that the mayor is under indictment, court filings are starting to expose a lot of details that were deliberately kept out of public view as the FBI engaged in its investigation.

One of those details is the fact that the FBI executed a search warrant targeting multiple phones used by Mayor Adams. However, his personal phone was not among those seized. A subpoena was issued ordering the mayor to turn over his personal phone (which is alleged to be the device the mayor used to “communicate about the conduct described in this indictment”). Mayor Adams complied. Sort of. He gave the FBI his phone. What he didn’t give the FBI was a way to see the phone’s contents, according to this report by Gaby Del Valle for The Verge.

When Adams turned in his personal cellphone the following day, charging documents say, he said he had changed the password a day prior — after learning about the investigation — and couldn’t remember it.

Sure looks like an attempt to withhold and/or destroy evidence. The fact that this happened the day after the FBI seized the mayor’s other phones isn’t going to work out well for him in court. His excuse — that he couldn’t remember it — is no more believable than his office’s assertion that everyone engaged in legal behavior because they were repeatedly told not to violate the law.

But both of those statements are far more believable than the mayor’s explanation of the post-FBI visit password changing:

Adams told investigators he changed the password “to prevent members of his staff from inadvertently or intentionally deleting the contents of his phone,” the indictment alleges.

LOL

Keep in mind, this was the mayor’s personal phone. Pretending staffers had routine and easy access to it or its contents beggars belief. And the simplest way to prevent staffers from “accidentally” deleting evidence of alleged criminal actions would be to maintain possession of the phone on your person or throw it in a safe or lock it in a desk drawer or do literally anything other than change a password and immediately “forget” what it was.

Again, none of this is going to reflect well on the mayor as he faces these charges in court. Any judge will see it the way the rest of us see it: a deliberate attempt to thwart a federal investigation.

Even so, let’s hope this doesn’t result in any stupid precedent motivated by the mayor’s apparently willful attempt to obstruct this investigation. There’s some potential here for rulings that might negatively affect Fifth Amendment rights and/or give the feds leverage to agitate for compelled assistance from phone manufacturers.

Because there’s a chance it might do any of these things. The FBI has had the phone for a long time. And it still hasn’t managed to access its contents. The FBI insists (without supporting evidence, obviously) that this is a BIG DEAL that might BREAK THE CASE.

During a federal court hearing, prosecutor Hagan Scotten said the FBI’s inability to get into Adams’ phone is a “significant wild card,” according to a report from the New York Post.

I want to believe that might be true. But only because I want the feds to deliver a ton of incriminating evidence that takes down Mayor Adams and anyone else in his administration who engaged in corruption. On the other hand, the FBI always claims any phone it can’t get into must be loaded with incriminating evidence capable of producing slam-dunk prosecutions. The FBI’s anti-encryption agitation relies on its fervent belief that the best and most incriminating evidence is always found on encrypted devices, therefore courts should force companies (or accused persons) to decrypt the contents so special agents can open and close investigations without ever leaving their desks.

I’m definitely here for the fallout. I’m guessing these raids will lead to a string of resignations, a cooperating witness or two, and a few wrist slaps for ex-law enforcement officials. But if someone’s going to burn for this, it should be the person at the top of the city food chain. And as much as I’d like to see that happen, I’d much rather it was accomplished without collateral damage to Ccnstitutional rights or the security and privacy provided by strong encryption.

Filed Under: 5th amendment, doj, encryption, eric adams, fbi, nyc, phone searches

As Trump Continues To Fearmonger, Stats Continue To Show Drops In Violent Crime Rates

from the grinding-the-ax-to-a-nub dept

There is no crime apocalypse impending, incipient, or in progress in the United States. But you wouldn’t know by listening to Trump and his supporters.

Former President Donald Trump is wildly distorting new statistics on immigration and crime to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump falsely claimed Friday and Saturday that the statistics are specifically about criminal offenders who entered the US during the Biden-Harris administration; in reality, the figures are about offenders who entered the US over multiple decades, including during the Trump administration. And Trump falsely claimed that the statistics are specifically about people who are now living freely in the US; the figures actually include people who are currently in jails and prisons serving criminal sentences.

On top of everything else that’s wrong with this joint attack on immigration (including legal immigration) and his political opponent, there’s the inconvenient fact that immigrants (whether they’re here legally or not) commit crimes at a lower rate than US citizens.

As for the crime committed by the only Americans Trump claims to care about (that would be natural-born citizens), they did more crime when he was in office.

“Homicides Are Skyrocketing in American Cities Under Kamala Harris,” Donald Trump’s campaign charged this week. Like Trump’s assertion that “our crime rate is going up,” this claim is completely at odds with reality, reports Reason.

FBI data say homicide totals jumped by more than 27 percent in 2020, when Trump was president; rose slightly in 2021, the first year of the Biden administration; and fell by 7 percent in 2022. Preliminary FBI numbers show bigger drops in 2023 (about 13 percent) and this year (26 percent for the first quarter).

To call these “lies” is to give Trump too much credit. I doubt he’s ever looked at crime stats. He just says whatever he believes is right or will get a rise out of his audiences. To say these are “lies” suggests a level of due diligence Trump will never perform. It’s still malicious, but it’s ignorantly malicious. It’s all just a game for him — a zero-sum contest in which he wants to rack up all the unearned “wins” he can because he (incorrectly) assumes every round of applause (or idiotic endorsement), means he’s subtracted an equal amount of support from his opponent’s voting bloc.

But eventually the data can’t be ignored. Crime rates continue to drop, undercutting claims even the FBI continues to make about needing more power (and reduced civil rights) to fight a crime wave that stubbornly refuses to materialize.

Annual data released by the FBI on Monday confirms a clear decline in both violent crime and property crime last year, with homicides and reported rapes accounting for the biggest drops.

The data shows that car theft was one of the few crimes with a notable increase between 2022 and 2023, up an estimated 20 percent.

[…]

According to the report, violent crime dropped 3 percent between 2022 and 2023, with murder and nonnegligent homicide down 11.6 percent. Reported rape offenses dropped 9.4 percent. Property crime decreased 2.4 percent.

And the most violent crime dropped the most, at least in terms of year-over-year reporting.

The drop in murders in 2023 was the largest year-over-year decline reported by the FBI in 20 years.

Now, there are still some fair criticisms of this reporting. First, reporting requirements and crime categorization were drastically altered a few years ago, which has led to incomplete (or even incoherent) crime reporting from responding agencies. On top of that, only about 70% of the nation’s law enforcement agencies send data to the FBI, with the rest either blowing off this responsibility, or still trying to alter their data-gathering to align with the new reporting requirements.

On top of that, the crime numbers rely on reported crime. Anything not reported by US residents won’t be reflected here. But it’s safe to say most murders are being reported. As for property crime, reporting rates are likely tied to residents’ views of their local law enforcement. If they feel cops just don’t care, they won’t report criminal acts. If they believe a report might lead to meaningful action or, at the very least, a competent investigation, they’re far more likely to contact law enforcement.

But that last part has always been a factor in crime reporting. None of that has changed no matter who’s sitting in the Oval Office. But it’s incredibly foolish to continue to pretend reported crime is on the rise when it has been steadily declining. And it’s insanely irresponsible to pretend this nation is overrun by the most violent of criminals when there’s absolutely zero evidence to support that assertions when you’re trying to convert bigotry into violent government action.

But Trump is a dangerous person. And, while he likes to pretend Kamala Harris is some sort of weak-willed, bleeding heart liberal when it comes to crime, the reality is that she spent years as a prosecutor and was the sort of “tough of crime” person Trump would normally ally himself with if he wasn’t running against them.

The reality is we’re still enjoying a pretty much uninterrupted two-decade run of historically low crime rates. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something, whether it’s their own political career or whatever products advertisers are pushing during newscasts.

If there’s anything everyone should keep in mind as they head to the polls in November, it’s Trump and his voting base that are deeply involved in one of the most wide-ranging criminal investigations ever handled by federal law enforcement — one that involves literally hundreds of criminal defendants: the insurrection attempt that followed Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. The party of “law and order” only cares about the laws it can wield against others. The laws that apply to it and its voting base simply no longer matter.

Filed Under: crime rates, donald trump, fbi, lies, uniform crime reporting

The DOJ Has Always Had The Ability To Take Down Domestic Terrorists, Just Not The Desire

from the law-enforcement-hates-going-after-its-own dept

The FBI and DOJ have always felt comfortable going after Islamic extremists. That’s the sort of thing they like to do. They like it so much they’ll radicalize vulnerable people for the sole purpose of locking them up for multiple decades.

A lot of digital ink has been spilled covering the FBI’s success rate in taking down people its operatives and informants have converted into “terrorists.” While this does next to nothing to make the nation more secure, it allows the DOJ and FBI to tout its string of “wins” against people who neither had the mental capacity, funds, or actual desire to do harm to American citizens in the name of Islam.

Going after domestic terrorists is a different story. White nationalists, far right extremists, and actual Nazis have always seemed a bit more difficult to take down. But that’s not because the government doesn’t have the power, tools, or expertise to do it. It’s because going after domestic extremists means going after people who have joined groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters. A Venn diagram of these extremist groups and law enforcement officers would contain a disturbingly large overlap.

Never has that been more apparent than following the January 6th insurrection. Far too many law enforcement officers engaged in lawbreaking on that day, joining a mob that gleefully assaulted many of their fellow officers who were asked (belatedly) to defend the Capitol from Trump supporters who wished to return their cult leader to office via violence, threats, and intimidation.

But now the DOJ is actually trying to dismantle domestic extremist groups with plenty of American members. This report by Ali Winston for Wired details the federal indictment of two members of a far-right extremist group Terrorgram Collective — a neo-Nazi network that is cross-pollinated by long-known Nazi groups like Atomwaffen.

On Monday, United States prosecutors in Sacramento unveiled a 15-count indictment accusing Dallas Erin Humber, 34, and Matthew Robert Allison, 37, of serving as core members of a virulent neo-Nazi propaganda network that solicited attacks on federal officials, power infrastructure, people of color, and material support for acts of terrorism both within the US and overseas.

The group, known as the Terrorgram Collective, has produced four publications to date—a blend of ideological motivation, mass murder worship, neo-fascist indoctrination, and how-to manuals for chemical weapons attacks, infrastructure sabotage, and ethnic cleansing. The screeds have directly inspired a series of ideologically motivated attacks around the world, including a 2022 mass shooting at an LGBTQ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia; successful attacks on power infrastructure in North Carolina, similar failed plots in Baltimore and New Jersey; and a stabbing spree in the Turkish city of Eskişehir.

The group considers people like Oklahoma federal building bomber Timothy McVeigh and Norwegian mass murder Anders Brevik among its patron saints. It is dedicated into turning the United States into a neo-Nazi paradise through violent means. And it has largely been left alone in past years because the DOJ apparently didn’t feel going after domestic terrorists with white skin would be as politically expedient or publicly popular as going after people with browner skin and non-Christian religious affiliations. On top of that, the FBI has plenty of agents and employees who are more loyal to a former president than their own oaths of office.

The official excuse — at least as it’s presented in court documents — is that the UK government has finally given the United States the leverage it needs to prosecute its own home-grown terrorists. But that’s just a convenient excuse for years of inaction, as one former FBI agent points out.

Relying on the UK government’s April order declaring the Terrorgram Collective a banned terrorist group and a little-employed section of the “material support for terrorism” section of the US criminal code, federal prosecutors are finally taking an aggressive, whole-of-law approach to violent neo-fascist extremism.

“What it shows is exactly what I’ve been arguing for years:, All the tools they need to do this work, they have,” says Michael German, a former FBI special agent and a liberty and national security fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, an NYU School of Law nonprofit. German points to years of arguments by the FBI and Department of Justice that they are hamstrung by existing laws when it comes to tackling violent extremists within the United States. “It also reveals the false separation that the government makes about international and domestic terrorism—white supremacy has always been transnational.”

Pretending this is a recent development is ridiculous. Domestic white nationalists and neo-Nazis have always been guided by and communicated with foreign groups with the same twisted ideals. What this clearly demonstrates is that previous DOJ officials and presidential administrations have been reluctant to go after these terrorists because they’re white, they vote, and far too often, the groups contain members of US law enforcement.

Now, the mask is off, so to speak. The government has the power to tackle domestic extremists who are willing to commit violence against their fellow Americans to further their white-makes-right goals. Of course, the new problem is the old problem: this new form of equality (I guess?) basically doubles the chances more people (and not just the brown ones!) will become victims of the entrapment the FBI likes to call “counter-terrorism.”

Filed Under: atomwaffen, doj, domestic extremism, domestic terrorism, far right, fbi, nazis, terrorgram collective, white nationalists

NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ Ex-Cop City Hall Buddies Spent Most Of Last Week Getting Raided By The FBI

from the ex-cop-distances-himself-from-ex-cops-he-employed dept

The most powerful entity in New York City isn’t the Mayor. Or City Hall. It has always been the NYPD, which has never been overseen by anyone who could remotely be considered capable, much less willing, to hold the department accountable, at least not in my lifetime. The chain of succession at City Hall over the past 40 years runs from Ed Koch to Rudy Giuliani to Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio, with a brief stop for David Dinkins, who was quickly kicked to the curb by open bigotry and powerful police unions when it became clear he might actually try to introduce stronger accountability measures.

Bill de Blasio was the only mayor to be roundly rejected by the NYPD, and even that rejection was only temporary. Everyone in this chain of commanders has done everything they can to protect the NYPD. The present mayor may be the worst so far — a company man whose years of service as an NYPD officer have made him more deferential than most.

New York City hasn’t quite reached the levels of corruption that has made Chicago (in)famous, but it’s going to keep trying! With each passing year and election of an NYPD-worshiping mayor, the level of corruption increases. Believing otherwise is pure denialism.

And now, the mayor whose buddies in the cop shop (some current, some former) led him to deploy a gun-detection system the system’s developer has admitted won’t actually work where it’s being deployed (NYC’s subway system) is now at the center of another classic NYC clusterfuck. Here’s ABC News with more details:

The FBI conducted searches at the homes of two of New York City Mayor Eric Adams‘ closest aides on Thursday, sources familiar with the investigation told ABC News.

The Hamilton Heights home of First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, who is engaged to Schools Chancellor David Banks, and the Hollis, Queens, home of Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks, were searched as part of an ongoing investigation, the sources said.

That early reporting might make it seem as though these raids were tied to a couple of outliers, albeit ones working very closely with Mayor Eric Adams. Later reporting makes it clear the problem isn’t limited to Sheena Wright and Phil Banks.

On Wednesday, in coordinated early morning raids, FBI agents seized phones and/or searched the homes of more than half a dozen senior city officials, including Sheena Wright, first deputy mayor; David Banks, schools chancellor, and his brother Philip Banks III, deputy mayor for public safety; Edward Caban, NYPD commissioner; and Timothy Pearson, mayoral adviser.

That’s multiple raids in one day, all targeting City Hall employees with close ties to Eric Adams. You’ll also note that one of the raid targets was the NYPD commissioner himself, Edward Caban — someone who has his own antagonism towards notions of law enforcement accountability.

But there’s a larger law enforcement nexus here. Eric Adams is a former NYPD officer. Philip Banks is a former NYPD department chief — one who resigned suddenly a decade ago when news surfaced he was involved in the bribing of several city officials. Adams liked Banks enough to give him a job, despite his immediately obvious ethical concerns.

Mayor Adams’ adviser, Timothy Pearson has his own issues. He held down a job at Resorts World Casino while simultaneously working for the mayor’s office. Pearson only exited his casino job after this double-dipping was exposed by the press. He’s also been sued four times for sexual harassment.

As for Commissioner Caban, he’s his own bag of trouble:

Commissioner Caban came under a cloud when it turned out his brother, Richard, was operating a Bronx bar and restaurant called Con Sofrito — a place where Adams celebrated his birthday and NYPD brass liked to party — in violation of multiple building and fire-safety codes and a judge’s order to shut down an outdoor terrace.

And yet, he’s still somehow the NYPD commissioner. And all of this comes on top of preexisting scandals, including multiple convictions tied to illegal fundraising for Adams’ 2021 mayoral campaign.

Eric Adams — a.k.a. Mr. Law Enforcement — doesn’t seem to be all that concerned about enforcing laws. His staff and political appointees are allegedly engaged in an unknown amount of lawbreaking. And that only covers the recent raids, which, at minimum, imply unlawful activity. There’s also plenty of confirmed lawlessness on the record.

All of that adds up to this spectacularly terrible response from the mayor’s office in response to the raids:

“Investigators have not indicated to us the mayor or his staff are targets of any investigation,” the mayor’s chief counsel, Lisa Zornberg, said in a statement. “As a former member of law enforcement, the mayor has repeatedly made clear that all members of the team need to follow the law.”

First, the feds don’t need to “indicate” anything about the mayor’s staff. It’s already clear at least one member of his staff (adviser Timothy Pearson) is the “target” of an “investigation.” Second, what the fuck does this even mean: “the mayor has repeatedly made it clear that all members of the team need to follow the law.”

I have worked a number of jobs over the past 30 years, both as a subordinate and a supervisor. I have been told (or have told others) to “follow the law” exactly zero times over that period. This is not a normal thing for people to say. If it’s something you have to say “repeatedly,” it’s because you or the people you employ are “repeatedly” trying to violate the law or, as the case would seem to be here, actually violating the law.

Not that the NYPD is handling this any better following the raid of Commissioner Caban’s house. Its response to these events was to eject anyone asking questions or reporting on the raids.

When the Post tried to reach chief of patrol John Chell for comment about the raids and subpoenas,” the paper reports, “NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Public Information Tarik Sheppard got on the phone and called the reporter a ‘f- – – ing scumbag.’” Minutes later, the department reportedly kicked Tina Moore, the Post’s police bureau chief, out of the press room at NYPD headquarters.

Not a great look for anyone involved or anyone close to those involved. This is going to get extremely interesting extremely quickly. Friends, cohorts, and actual employees of the mayor and his office have already been on the receiving end of FBI raids. It’s only a matter of time before the bell tolls for the mayor himself. Even if Adams was smart enough to generate some plausible deniability, someone under investigation is going to roll over and offer up enough evidence to pierce this façade. Mayor Adams may ultimately survive this, but it’s going to leave permanent scars.

The overarching theme, however, is something we’ve seen several times before: the people who talk the loudest about law and order are the people who most frequently decide laws don’t apply to them. Power corrupts, and those with the most of it are almost always the first to succumb to this inevitability. As for the city itself, I guess it’s time to try again when the next election rolls around. But history suggests Adams will just be replaced by someone equally terrible and equally subservient to the whims and demands of the city’s law enforcers.

Filed Under: corruption, eric adams, fbi, new york city, nypd

The FBI’s Child Sexual Abuse Efforts Are As Half-Assed As Its Counterterrorism Efforts

from the working-hard-or-hardly-working-amirite dept

The FBI keeps telling anyone who will listen that it wants more responsibilities. Despite having failed to end organized crime or to even slightly diminish the power of international drug cartels, the FBI is always asking for more to do, especially if it means more funding and surveillance powers.

It set itself up to be an integral part of the national security apparatus by putting its manpower and expertise to work locating and arresting potential terrorists. But that work seemed too difficult, so the FBI soon started satisfying itself by assigning agents to laptops and urging them to radicalize the most ignorant or needy people they might run across online in order to set them up with 25-year minimum sentences.

This lack of effort has carried over to its work on the child sexual abuse front. Child sexual abuse and terrorism are the things cited by FBI directors as the reason encryption must be abolished now. But this abuse and terrorism are the things the FBI is worst at handling. We’re well aware of the FBI’s abhorrent habit of congratulating itself for talking people into becoming terrorists. On the other end of that spectrum is another problem the FBI isn’t handling well — one that seems more tied to the FBI’s apparent lack of interest, rather than the supposed “obstacles” (which always means encryption) agents face when investigating these cases.

The FBI should be doing better handling child sexual abuse reports. After all, it was recently successfully sued by several victims of sexual abuse perpetrated by US Gymnastics team doctor, Larry Nassar. You’d think that would have been a wake-up call. But as a recent report [PDF] by the DOJ Inspector General’s office points out, the agency is still mostly asleep at the wheel.

In a review brought on by the FBI’s failures to promptly investigate Nassar, the inspector general found serious problems persist that run the risk of child sexual abuse allegations falling through the cracks as overworked agents juggle dozens of cases at a time. In one case, a victim was abused for 15 months after the FBI first received a tip about a registered sex offender, the report said.

And that’s not an outlier. There’s more detailed in the report which shows child sexual abuse reports are being backburnered regularly, despite the FBI’s public claims (again, often associated with calls to end encryption) that this is one of the crimes it really, truly, and deeply cares about.

But all the care in the world is useless when that alleged “care” doesn’t extend to basic things like allocating more manpower and resources to handle this problem. The FBI obviously knows the problem needs more of both. But it has decided to do less with less, which sends the signal the FBI doesn’t care as much about this problem as it publicly claims to.

Even while acknowledging errors, the FBI cited the “overwhelming” burden on agents tasked with investigating crimes against children given the conduct involved, an influx in tips flooding in to law enforcement, increased use of encrypted technology to conceal the offenses and budget cuts.

Citing one agent who was juggling about 60 investigations, the inspector general said special agents “must constantly triage their caseload.”

So, the FBI obviously is aware of the problem. It doesn’t have enough people assigned to handle these cases. And it should have made some adjustments after being sued for handling the Nassar case so poorly. But its responses blame everyone else for things only the FBI can control: agents and their workloads.

So far, the FBI has made zero changes. The Inspector General’s recommendations include stunningly obvious things like this:

[we] recommend that the FBI develop an enterprise-wide strategy that addresses the rising number of CAC/HT [Crimes Against Children/Human Trafficking] cases and ensures CAC/HT agents have appropriate support and resources to manage their assigned caseloads.

This is an issue the FBI should have addressed long ago. Instead, it has chosen to bury over-worked investigators in cases — something that has obviously resulted in the extension of abuse of children and human trafficking victims.

Considering this wing of the FBI is overbooked and understaffed, it hardly makes sense that the FBI and DOJ would spend so much time complaining about the potential downturn in social media service reports forwarded to it by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NMCEC). The supposed vanishing of these reports was integral to the FBI’s anti-encryption agitation, backed by claims that things like the addition of end-to-end encryption to Facebook’s Messenger service would allow perpetrators of child sexual abuse to go undetected and/or unpunished.

But it’s clear from this report there’s a good chance these criminals will go undetected or unpunished even without the addition of encryption. And while some agents and offices are attempting to make a dent in the millions of NMCEC tips the FBI receives, the FBI — as a whole — still isn’t treating this problem seriously.

[W]e found that the number of CAC/HT cases (Assessments and predicated investigations) opened and leads set by the FBI has increased. Fifteen field offices proposed realigning Funded Staffing Levels (FSL) between programs and increasing the number of Special Agents dedicated to the CAC/HT threat by 19 in FY 2023. Only one of these requests, for one agent, was approved. Seven field offices appealed the decision to deny the realignment, but none of these appeals were successful.

If the FBI was taking this as seriously as it claims it is, changes would have already been made. Instead, crimes against children are treated as less important than other agent activities, a lot of which are focused on two wars the FBI can’t possibly win: the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. While children continue to be victimized, FBI agents are talking people into committing terrorist acts and assisting multiple levels of law enforcement in drug war efforts that seem to be more focused on how much property can be seized, rather than anything that might actually deter the flow of drugs into the country.

The FBI needs to do better. Not only does it under-deliver, but it can scarcely be bothered to over-promise unless there’s funding on the line. Americans are paying for this subpar level of service. And everything in this report indicates the FBI just doesn’t care enough about the problem to actually do anything to solve it.

Filed Under: child sexual abuse, doj, failure, fbi

FBI Wants More Access To Everything, Can’t Be Bothered To Protect The Stuff It Already Has

from the bringing-down-a-nation-by-visiting-a-recycling-center dept

The FBI has been pulled right up to the national security table for years. Having switched from regular law enforcement agency to being a major player in the counter-terrorism field has seen it avail itself of vast collections of data obtained by the NSA. While its own contributions to combating terrorism have been questionable at best, only recently was its access to NSA data seriously challenged.

But nothing came of that and things go on as they have for the past two decades. As if that wasn’t enough, the FBI’s directors constantly complain about encryption getting in the way of slurping up communications and scraping seized phones of all their data.

Well, all of the stuff the FBI currently collects, obtains, or has access to has to be stored somewhere. And it wants to add to these haystacks. But when the haystacks needs to be rotated out due to device failure or hardware updates, the FBI apparently believes no precautions should be taken to make sure classified and sensitive data doesn’t end up in the hands of others.

That’s what DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz has highlighted in his recent memo to the agency, which points out its extremely careless handling of discarded computer hardware.

We found the FBI does not always account for its loose electronic storage media, including hard drives that were extracted from computers and servers, thumb drives, and floppy disks. For example, the FBI instructs field offices to remove hard drives slated for destruction from Top Secret computers to be couriered separately to save on shipping costs. However, extracted internal hard drives are not tracked, and the FBI does not have the ability to confirm that these hard drives that contained SBU and/or NSI information were properly destroyed. The lack of accountability of these media increases the risk of loss or theft without possibility of detection.

Not great! There are small companies that handle device and data destruction more responsibly than this and their overriding concern is maintaining market share, rather than, say, securing a nation.

The FBI also handles classified data almost as carelessly as a former president. While servers and drives might be marked to indicate the presence of classified or top secret data, data extracted for disposal is placed on other devices that do not bear these markings, making it that much easier for top secret data to be treated as carelessly as trash from the office break room.

On top of that, the FBI tends to take its time destroying hardware, which results in warehouses full of components that are potentially full of extremely sensitive information. This long-term storage is overseen by… nobody.

Non-accountable assets slated for destruction were stored on pallets without sufficient internal physical security for an extended period of time. For example, a pallet containing extracted internal hard drives marked non-accountable had been stored for 21 months and had wrapping that was torn and left open. This facility is shared with other FBI operations, such as logistics, mail, and information technology equipment fulfilment, and had almost 400 persons with access as of May 2024, including 28 task force officers and 63 contractors from at least 17 companies. Both the FBI supervisor and contractor confirmed that they would not be aware if someone was to take hard drives from the pallets because these assets are not accounted for or tracked.

I’m tempted to believe “non-accountable assets” is a reference to FBI employees. But even if it’s meant to designate devices that most likely do not contain classified or top secret information, there’s no way the FBI itself can say for sure because of the previous two problems the IG discovered: top secret/classified info isn’t always accounted for and some devices containing sensitive info get placed on the “please destroy” pile without proper external labeling.

Ignoring every requirement along the way to destruction results in stuff like this, which doesn’t exactly instill confidence in the FBI’s ability to stay on task, be detail-oriented, or many other basic levels of competency one would hope to find in the nation’s largest law enforcement agency.

Walmart takes more care securing its Black Friday pallets than the FBI does with its pallets full of sensitive info. Keep that in mind the next time the FBI’s complaining it simply doesn’t have enough access to data or top secret information. It doesn’t secure what it already has. It definitely shouldn’t be entrusted with anything more until it can handle this very basic part of internal security.

Filed Under: classified documents, doj, fbi, inspector general

FBI Back To Complaining About Encryption Making It Difficult To Scrape All Data From A Dead Person’s Phone

from the can-it,-chris dept

It’s 2016 all over again. The FBI can’t get everything it wants from a dead person’s phone, so it has decided to start revving up its anti-encryption engine. The DOJ took Apple to court in hopes of securing precedent compelling tech companies to crack encrypted devices for it after it recovered the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone. That attempt failed. But that hasn’t stopped the complaining.

Before we get into the latest bout of whining to Congress, let’s take a look back at another date: May 29, 2018. That’s the date the FBI acknowledged it had seriously overstated the number of uncracked encrypted devices in its possession. That was the same day it promised to deliver an updated, far more accurate tally of these devices. It has been 2,246 days since that promise was made — 6 years, 1 month, and 23 days. That number still has not been updated.

However, that six years has been filled with FBI Director Chris Wray’s intermittent bad faith attacks on encryption. If nothing else, no one should allow the FBI to push anti-encryption arguments until it hands over the updated number of devices so everyone has the same facts available to gauge exactly how big the “problem” is.

But the latest round of complaints sound like the ones made in 2016. Even though the FBI was able to break into the Trump rally shooter’s device thanks to unreleased software provided by Cellebrite, Chris Wray is telling Congress that being able to break into a phone simply isn’t enough. All encryption must go, not just that protecting the device itself.

Wray said the bureau is facing challenges with getting into “encrypted messaging applications” used by Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper team after firing at least eight shots toward the stage at the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Reports said officials have identified at least three such accounts.

Speaking to the House Judiciary Committee, Wray said that in some cases, the FBI is waiting on “legal process returns” to get into the accounts. He did not specify what companies or services host them.

Wray is presenting the reality of all criminal investigations like it’s evidence that the criminals are constantly one step ahead of the feds, even when said criminal is dead and neither facing prosecution nor capable of committing more crime. It’s not a great test case for anti-encryption legal battles or legislation, much like the last time the FBI made a lot of noise about not being able to get into a dead person’s phone.

But that’s not all Wray said. This part is even worse and a whole lot stupider.

“This has unfortunately become very commonplace,” he said. “It’s a real challenge not just for the FBI but for state and local law enforcement all over the country.” Even with access to a user’s phone, the end-to-end encryption used in many apps would make messages and other data inaccessible even to the app developer.

“Some places we’ve been able to look, some places we will be able to look, some places we may never be able to see, no matter how good our legal process is,” Wray said.

First off, there’s no way of telling how “commonplace” this is because, as noted above, the FBI’s encrypted device numbers have been wrong for more than six years and have yet to be corrected. We can assume it’s more commonplace now that more services are offering end-to-end encryption, but we should not automatically assume it’s enough to be referred to casually as “commonplace” and a persistent threat to successful criminal investigations. If it were, one would expect to hear more about it from other law enforcement officials. Instead, most of what we hear about the supposed evil of encryption has come from the mouths of consecutive FBI directors.

As for the second paragraph, that’s something that’s always been true about criminal investigations, dating back to long before devices or device encryption existed. No investigation will ever uncover all existing evidence. It’s an impossibility. Some evidence will be destroyed. Some evidence simply won’t be where investigators are looking for it. And some evidence is ethereal, gone as soon as it’s uttered via untapped phone calls or in-person conversations.

Pretending that this reality of criminal investigations is somehow new is intellectual dishonesty. Claiming that it’s somehow more common due to encrypted devices and communication services is meaningless if the FBI’s not willing to give the public — or at least its congressional oversight — accurate information detailing just how often the FBI runs into this particular problem.

Until the FBI can be honest about the problem its directors claim is omnipresent, its anti-encryption agitation should be ignored. And it should certainly be ignored when the FBI is doing nothing more than complaining about a lack of access to a dead person’s phone contents and communications.

Filed Under: chris wray, encryption, fbi, lawful access
Companies: cellebrite

Cellebrite Sent The FBI Unreleased Software To Crack The Trump Shooter’s Phone

from the to-what-end-though dept

If nothing else, it appears the FBI has decided it’s not worth fighting the “compelled assistance” battle again. Several years ago, the DOJ went to court in hopes of forcing Apple to decrypt a phone belonging to the (dead) San Bernardino shooter.

It didn’t go well for the DOJ or the FBI, no matter how much then-FBI director James Comey bitched about it. The phone was eventually unlocked. And Comey has since been replaced, but his successor (Chris Wray) is just as dumb, dishonest, and histrionic about device encryption.

Fortunately, we haven’t heard anything from Chris Wray about the latest extremely minimal and temporary hiccup the FBI encountered while breaking into the phone owned by the person who tried to kill Donald Trump but killed an innocent person instead.

After a couple of days of failure, the FBI apparently reached out to one of its preferred vendors. And, as Bloomberg reports, that company — the Israel-based Cellebrite — apparently had a solution.

The agents called Cellebrite’s federal team, which liaises with law enforcement and government agencies, according to the people.

Within hours, Cellebrite transferred to the FBI in Quantico, Virginia, additional technical support and new software that was still being developed. The details about the unsuccessful initial attempt to access the phone, and the unreleased software, haven’t been previously reported.

Once the FBI had the Cellebrite software update, unlocking the phone took 40 minutes, according to reporting in the Washington Post, which first detailed the FBI’s use of Cellebrite.

So much for “going dark.” This reporting follows a report on leaked Cellebrite documents by Joseph Cox for 404 Media that detailed Cellebrite’s capabilities, at least as of April 2024. According to those documents, post-2020 iPhones running the latest version of iOS were beyond the cellphone-cracking powers of Cellebrite. It wasn’t quite as clear-cut for Android phones, although it did appear Google Pixels were less crackable than others.

According to the Bloomberg report, the shooter’s phone was a “newer Samsung model,” which doesn’t add much to the “what phones can be cracked” matrix. While I’m sure the FBI appreciated the assist from Cellebrite, it’s unclear what they hope to learn from cracking the dead shooter’s phone.

What they have learned isn’t doing much to assure the public that law enforcement is at the top of its game, especially when it comes to the Secret Service. What has been gleaned from the phone extraction are unsettling details like the shooter’s drone flight over the rally grounds prior to the shooting. It also hasn’t given exactly given Trump fans the satisfaction they so sorely want: the shooter was a registered Republican, albeit one that recently donated an extremely small amount to a progressive cause.

What is clear is that law enforcement isn’t out of options when it comes to encrypted devices. And that has always been the case, no matter how many might proclaim criminals have the upper hand, despite not being in control of Nasdaq-listed companies (which Cellebrite is). Phones can be cracked, even when the option of simply beating a password out of someone is no longer an option.

As for the rest of this sad state of affairs, I won’t say much more than this: the party encouraging the most violence was the recipient of it here. But the greater problem isn’t the rhetoric so much as it is the rhetorical options, so to speak. The Secret Service, working in conjunction with law enforcement, appears to have been looking past this game to the Republic National Convention, to use a sportsball analogy. But even if everyone had their shit locked down tight, there’s simply no way to completely prevent the act of violence witnessed during this Trump rally.

As usual, The Onion has summed it up best:

Investigation Finds Secret Service Failed To Account For Nation’s 393 Million Guns

And The Onion knows where we’re headed from here because it will always fail to see the forest for the 393 million trees:

WASHINGTON—In response to the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend, Congress moved quickly to pass legislation Monday that bans the civilian use of roofs. “As our country continues to reel from this horrific event, we in Congress have taken action by enacting a nationwide ban on all roofs, roof terraces, and balconies,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson, explaining that the would-be assassin, who shot at and nearly killed Trump from atop a building 430 feet away, highlighted just how lax U.S. laws had been in addressing the threat of widespread roof access.

In the end, the FBI got what it wanted. But what did it actually learn from this experience? So far, there are no answers. And no matter how much agents root around in the shooter’s phone, they’ll never find a satisfactory answer. All it got was the assurance that if it asks nicely (or desperately!), it will get the help it wants, even if it’s not anything it really needs.

Filed Under: cellphone cracking, donald trump, encryption, fbi
Companies: cellebrite, samsung

Leaked Docs Show Cellebrite Is Still Trailing Apple In The Device Security Arms Race

from the still-mostly-secure-on-the-home-front dept

Good news for phone owners. Perhaps a little less great for law enforcement, which presumably still doesn’t have the capability to crack the latest cell phones.

Not that it’s all bad news for law enforcement. Whether or not compelled password production is a constitutional violation is still an open question. Those whose phones are secured with biometrics are definitely less protected by the Constitution than those using passcodes. And, despite all the crying you might hear from officials (like, say, consecutive FBI directors), law enforcement still has plenty of options to obtain evidence that don’t involve cracking encrypted devices but rather serving warrants to service providers to obtain stuff stored in the cloud.

Cellebrite has been selling its phone-cracking tech for several years now. But it’s stuck in a one step forward, one step back loop as device makers patch exploitable flaws, including those used by purveyors of these devices.

Joseph Cox of 404 Media managed to obtain some very recent documents that apparently show the limitations of Cellebrite’s tech. The documents were leaked in April 2024, which doesn’t necessarily mean they document Cellebrite’s latest software version, but they do at least provide a fairly up-to-date snapshot of the tech’s capabilities.

For all locked iPhones able to run 17.4 or newer, the Cellebrite document says “In Research,” meaning they cannot necessarily be unlocked with Cellebrite’s tools. For previous iterations of iOS 17, stretching from 17.1 to 17.3.1, Cellebrite says it does support the iPhone XR and iPhone 11 series. Specifically, the document says Cellebrite recently added support to those models for its Supersonic BF [brute force] capability, which claims to gain access to phones quickly. But for the iPhone 12 and up running those operating systems, Cellebrite says support is “Coming soon.”

As Cox notes in his article, this means Cellebrite is capable of cracking iPhones released through the first part of 2020, but possibly only if they haven’t been updated to the latest iOS version. That’s still a significant number of phones, which means staying ahead of Cellebrite possibly means having to be an early adopter or, at the very least, ensuring the latest updates have been applied to your phone.

The same can’t be said for Android, something pretty much everyone has already known. Not only are carriers hit-and-miss when it comes to regular Android updates, the wide variety of manufacturers and models means it’s often difficult to tell which Android model is more secure (or, more accurately, less compromised). The rule of thumb, though, is that newer is better, at least in terms of crack-thwarting.

The second document shows that Cellebrite does not have blanket coverage of locked Android devices either, although it covers most of those listed. Cellebrite cannot, for example, brute force a Google Pixel 6, 7, or 8 that has been turned off to get the users’ data, according to the document. The most recent version of Android at the time of the Cellebrite documents was Android 14, released October 2023. The Pixel 6 was released in 2021.

Cellebrite has confirmed the authenticity of the leaked documents but told 404 Media that it does not completely reflect its current line of products or their capabilities. So, these should be taken with at least as large a grain of salt as Cellebrite’s statement. If these documents accurately portray Cellebrite’s offerings, one would expect the company to claim they don’t in order to keep criminals (or journalists, activists, politicians, dissidents, etc.) guessing about the current state of cracking tech.

Then there’s the fact that Cellebrite is not the only player in this market, even if it appears to be the most well-known. Competitors are presumably engaged in the same race against patches and system updates in order to provide something worth paying for to government customers.

Finally, the Israel-based company appears to have been stung a bit by the steady deluge of negative press covering phone-hacking malware purveyors like NSO Group and Candiru, both of which have been blacklisted by the US government for selling their goods to known human rights violators.

“Cellebrite does not sell to countries sanctioned by the U.S., EU, UK or Israeli governments or those on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) blacklist. We only work with and pursue customers who we believe will act lawfully and not in a manner incompatible with privacy rights or human rights,” the email added.

Well, great, I guess. That answers a question no one asked, but as long as you’re in the news, I suppose it’s smart to get out ahead of the criticism, even if it’s still unspoken at this point.

While some in law enforcement might view this reporting as a half-empty glass where the tech they use will always be a step or two behind the efforts of device manufacturers, everyone else should see this as more than half-full. More companies and developers are putting more time and effort into ensuring the devices they sell are as secure as humanly possible. That’s a net win for everyone, even if you halfway believe the often-hysterical proclamations of government officials who think device security is the enemy of public safety.

It may not necessarily discourage device theft, but it does limit the damage done by those who steal devices. And it helps protect journalists, dissidents, activists, and political opposition leaders from abusive tech deployments just as much as it “protects” criminals from having their seized devices cracked. Non-criminals will always outnumber criminals. And that fact shouldn’t be ignored by law enforcement officials just because it makes things a bit tougher when it comes to extracting data from seized devices.

Filed Under: cellphone cracking, encryption, fbi
Companies: android, apple, cellebrite