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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   
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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Original Submission

• This is nothing new This is nothing new (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday June 23 2020, @02:59PM (1 child)

  by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday June 23 2020, @02:59PM (#1011584)

  The mindset of the 3-letter agencies divides the entire population of the world into 4 categories:
  1. The people who work for their organizations.
  2. The known bad guys (i.e. a threat to the 3-letter agencies or the handful of people allowed to give them direction, which has nothing to do with the law really).
  3. The bad guys who haven't been caught yet.
  4. The people who are no threat.

  This, in turn, leads to wanting to have a massive spying operation that gets as much information as possible about the entire population of the world so they can minimize group 3 and put them into groups 2 and 4 at any given time. And also highly relevant is that they want the information on the harmless (group 4) on file in case they manage to become a problem, e.g. by getting themselves elected to Congress and starting to ask questions disadvantageous to the agencies and the people running them.

  And that's why ever since the Internet has been open to the public, they've wanted to know what absolutely everybody on it is doing at all times. "But that's unconstitutional!", you might cry - no matter, you don't know about it, and if you did know about it you couldn't legally tell anybody, so if you, say, contacted a lawyer to sue the government for violating your rights, they can throw you in jail for revealing classified information.

  This got started in the Clinton administration with efforts to wiretap specific people whenever the FBI felt like it. By the George W Bush administration, they had convicted felon John Poindexter running a much larger effort called "Total Information Awareness" to monitor everybody. The Obama administration quietly continued efforts such as building a giant government-run data center in Utah that, based on its size alone, can store everything everyone has ever said or done online. And of course the Trump administration has been quite happy to continue this effort.

  And this stuff has been weaponized before: For example, a New York congressman started digging into what the three-letter agencies were doing, and all of a sudden his phone was allegedly hacked, some only-mildly-dirty pictures were sent to people posing as 15-year-olds, and before he knew it the entire world knew about Anthony Wiener a.k.a. Carlos Danger and his underwear pics.

  --
  The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.

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• Re:This is nothing new (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @03:16PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @03:16PM (#1011592)

  Uh huh, the TLAs took pix that Weiner just happened to have laying around and sent them via SMS. They faked the entire conversation too.

  Parent