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posted by janrinok on Thursday October 27 2016, @03:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the hacking-is-legal dept.

A US judge overseeing an FBI "Playpen case" has told agents to reveal whether or not their investigative hacking was approved by the White House.

The case is one of several the Feds are pursuing against more than 100 alleged users of the child sex abuse material exchange network called the Playpen. The prosecutions have become test grounds over investigators' use of hacking tools to unmask Tor users – Playpen was hidden in the Tor network and agents injected tracking software into Playpen visitors' browsers to identify users.

In June, a judge hearing one of the Playpen cases in Virginia ruled that the FBI can hack any computer in any country, if it wants.

During its investigation, the FBI compromised Playpen's Tor-protected distribution servers, leaving them in operation to keep users visiting the service. The Feds then hacked the targets' computers to identify the owners.

It's not a crime if the President orders it.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:23AM

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:23AM (#419338) Journal

    In June, a judge hearing one of the Playpen cases in Virginia ruled that the FBI can hack any computer in any country, if it wants.

    So the US judge has made this decision, and nobody can see a problem with this? When Russia or China hacks into a computer in the US, it is viewed as a belligerent act almost sufficient to warrant a military response or at least a diplomatic complaint. The media splash it around - DNC, hacking of US power networks, autistic people hacking into NASA or the DOD, DDoS attacks that can disable US companies in the US. Yet if the US wants to do so in return then the rest of the world must just suck it up. After all, a judge has said that the FBI can do it anywhere and anytime it wants to, so it must be OK, right?.

    The US might see itself as the world's police force, and sometimes it does some good by taking a lead. But believing that it has the right to hack into any computer anywhere in the world is not going make it any friends elsewhere. The NSA has a specific role and purpose and, although we might not accept its interpretation of that task we can at least understand why it might choose to do so. But the FBI does not have the same tasking. In fact, it has no jurisdiction whatsoever elsewhere in the world, unless host countries have granted it such authority.

    The judge is talking crap and if nobody in the US can see the down side to his proclamation then they are in for an interesting time ahead. The US has just opened the floodgates to hacking attacks on themselves. After all, the US doesn't get to decide which individuals are working on behalf of a foreign state and which are doing it for their own gain. How does it decide whether the hackers that brought Twitter, Facebook and others to their knees last week weren't doing it on the behest of their government which would be, if the US view is accepted, entirely legal?

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Thursday October 27 2016, @10:23AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday October 27 2016, @10:23AM (#419345) Journal
    It's a really dangerous precedent, because it effectively legalises tampering with evidence. Computer forensics is really, really hard. A big part of the reason is that you must maintain an evidence chain. You can't turn on a confiscated computer without potentially allowing it to erase evidence, so you must carefully image the drives. You must do so in a controlled environment so that both parties at a trial can present their own analysis and the defence expert witness can reproduce any analysis that the expert witness for the prosecution performs. This decision means that the prosecution is allowed to enter the result of running arbitrary, secret, code on the defendant's computer as if it were evidence. I'm willing to accept that the first few times that it's done it's all well intentioned and the evidence may be of real crimes, but once you make it legal for the police to plant evidence you've basically said goodbye to the rule of law.
    --
    sudo mod me up
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 27 2016, @01:15PM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday October 27 2016, @01:15PM (#419388) Journal

      once you make it legal for the police to plant evidence you've basically said goodbye to the rule of law

      You're right, but we're already there. Read the Snowden documents about how the NSA does that. The flip side is also that the government has given itself permission to ignore real evidence. The FBI can both plant evidence that isn't there, and ignore evidence that is really there. Power does what it wants now, with no constraints.

      Won't that be fun when people who have an enemies list that's 30-years long take over? Labor activists, conservatives, and all who don't kiss the ring will learn.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 27 2016, @01:09PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday October 27 2016, @01:09PM (#419386) Journal

    The judge is talking crap and if nobody in the US can see the down side to his proclamation then they are in for an interesting time ahead.

    We can see the downside, janrinok, but we have no remedy left until the guillotines are dusted off and put into service again. Nobody in government, from the humble hamlet to the leviathan in the Maryland/Virginia swamp, gives one whit for the rule of law anymore. The NSA doesn't. The FBI doesn't. The DEA doesn't. The IRS doesn't. Congress doesn't. The Whitehouse doesn't. Criminals have completed their coup over democracy and are about to annoint one of their own as a symbol of their final victory, after having rubbed our noses in their diffidence toward our collective naivete. On the local side, cops summarily execute citizens without ever being charged with murder, because they are enabled by prosecutors and a judiciary whose stock-in-trade is bullying and punishing; no amount of data about the rate of false convictions or parallel construction deters them or invites politicians, the ones who are supposedly accountable to somebody, to do anything about it.

    Everything here is broken. The only thing left is for gravity to pull the pieces asunder.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.