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FBI Using Social Media, E-Commerce Sites to Track Down Suspects (Including Non-Lawbreakers)

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday June 23 2020, @05:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the using-all-available-resources dept.

chromas writes:

So Much For Going Dark: FBI Using Social Media, E-Commerce Sites To Track Down Suspects (Including Non-Lawbreakers):

You know the drill, right? The FBI keeps insisting that it has a "going dark" problem due to encryption making it impossible to access key evidence of supposedly criminal behavior, in theory allowing crime to happen without recourse. The problem, though, is that nearly every single bit of this claim is false. It's kind of stunning.

  • It appears that, in practice, the FBI almost never runs into encryption.
  • In the rare cases where it has (and we don't know how many because since the FBI admitted it over exaggerated how many "locked" devices it had, and then has since refused to provide an updated count), there do appear to be ways to get into those devices anyway.
  • But the key issue, by far, is that the opposite of going dark is happening. Thanks to our increasingly electronic lives, the government actually has way more access to information than ever before.

Two recent articles highlight this in practice, with regards to the FBI trying to track down the rare cases of criminal activity happening around some of the protests.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @09:11AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @09:11AM (#1011476)

    Oh yes... About all the encrypted traffic these days...I believe it's an unintended but obvious consequence of music sharing legislation.

    Go through all that work of decryption only to uncover really bad music. My guess the DMCA is responsible for most of the encryption on the internet. Just kids sharing a song. Now everybody does it.

    Anyone who is seriously hiding stuff will stego it into some funny cat videos. Good luck finding those. And reversing how it was coded in. There are still a lot of assemblers out there to make custom stego tools with.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Oakenshield on Tuesday June 23 2020, @01:14PM (2 children)

    by Oakenshield (4900) on Tuesday June 23 2020, @01:14PM (#1011537)

    Oh yes... About all the encrypted traffic these days...I believe it's an unintended but obvious consequence of music sharing legislation.

    That's only a small part of it. Encryption really came into its own after Snowden announced what the most paranoid of us had been claiming for a long time.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by DeVilla on Tuesday June 23 2020, @09:36PM (1 child)

      by DeVilla (5354) on Tuesday June 23 2020, @09:36PM (#1011726)

      I call BS. What Snowden released exceeded what even the most paranoid people I knew expected.

      • (Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Tuesday June 23 2020, @09:50PM

        by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 23 2020, @09:50PM (#1011735) Journal

        Snowden announced what the most paranoid of us had been claiming for a long time.

        I call BS. What Snowden released exceeded what even the most paranoid people I knew expected.

        Not mutually exclusive statements.
         
        I'm aligned with GP though, plenty of folks had been indicating what Snowden revealed for years. What they didn't have was smoking red proof and they were summarily dissed as conspiracy nuts. In those circles the reaction was more "Yeah, we knew and told you that.... NOW you believe it?!?!"

        --
        В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды

  • (Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Tuesday June 23 2020, @03:26PM

    by pvanhoof (4638) on Tuesday June 23 2020, @03:26PM (#1011595) Homepage

    If I would have something really serious to hide my funny cat video would probably be one side of a One Time Pad. I would probably create a side that combined with the first results in a few MP3s. And of course a side that would result in the actual secret. But when they ask me to give the other side, with a $5 wrench, I would give them the side that results in MP3s ...