SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Discontinued on-the-fly disk encryption utility TrueCrypt was unable to keep out the FBI in the case of a US government techie who stole copies of classified military documents. How the Feds broke into the IT bod's encrypted TrueCrypt partition isn't clear.
It raises questions about the somewhat sinister situation surrounding the software team's sudden decision to stop working on the popular project last May.
US Air Force sysadmin Christopher Glenn was sent down for 10 years after stealing military documents relating to the Middle East, in addition to copying emails controlled by the commander of a special unit that conducts military operations in Central and South America and the Caribbean, as we reported.
Glenn, 34, had secret-level clearance, and worked at the Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras installing and maintaining Windows 7 systems when he swiped copies of the classified files. He was arrested, charged, and appeared before a court in the southern district of Florida, where he admitted breaking the US Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He was sentenced on Friday.
According to the Sun Sentinel , the court heard a claim by Gerald Parsons, an army counterintelligence expert, that the FBI had managed to access a concealed and encrypted hard-drive partition within which Glenn had hidden the stolen files.
The hidden compartment was protected using "a complex 30-character password," Parsons said. It would take the Feds millions of years to crack it by brute force. A summary of Parsons' testimony is here [PDF].
The court heard that the partition was created using TrueCrypt, a popular source-is-available encryption tool, developed from 2004 up until last year when its anonymous developers mysteriously closed the project down.
The TrueCrypt team's decision to cease maintenance of the project made headlines in the tech world when its website was replaced with a warning against continued use of the software, with little to no explanation of why.
[...] The encryption software that Glenn used to conceal the stolen classified materials in the Synology device is a program called TrueCrypt. In October 2011, Glenn had sent an email to an associate with an internet hyperlink to an article entitled 'FBI hackers fail to crack TrueCrypt.' In this case, the FBI did decrypt Glenn's hidden files containing the stolen classified materials.
It is, of course, entirely possible the FBI or some other agency was able to extract the password from Glenn while interrogating him – the man changed his plea to guilty halfway through the case, and may have sung like a canary. Or perhaps his computer systems were bugged, revealing his encryption key. You can read his plea bargaining here [PDF].
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MrGuy on Thursday August 06 2015, @01:21AM
The full text of the plea bargain is presented, and there does not (to my IANAL eye) seem to be any clause prohibiting the defendant from disclosing any details regarding the government's access to his computer.
So, he would seem to be free to disclose (without violating the plea bargain) whether he agreed to provide his password, or whether his password was weak, or whether in the course of discovery he learned how the government might have obtained his password.
I strongly suspect, if he was represented by competent counsel (which he apparently was), that if the government confronted him with files from a decrypted hard drive, and he had NOT provided the password, his lawyer would have insisted on seeing some evidence that the contents of the hard drive were admissible before advising his client to take a plea (unless there was enough evidence already that the hard drive wasn't needed). If the government installed a keylogger on his machine without a warrant, it would through a lot of legal doubt on the admissibility of the documents eventually recovered (since planting a keylogger without a warrant is a crime). If they had such a warrant, they'd have had to reveal it, and so the defendant would know they got his password via a keylogger (a fact that he seems he would be completely free to disclose).
(Score: 1) by eof on Thursday August 06 2015, @02:48PM
I have not read the details of the case, but regarding keyloggers, the government can install one on a government machine (and most employers on their machines) without breaking the law.
(Score: 2) by Nollij on Friday August 07 2015, @03:33AM
Many lawyers, in many cases, will tell their clients not to discuss the case. Not just before/during, but after.
Simply, there's usually nothing to be gained by talking.