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, Informative) by bradley13 on Thursday August 06 2015, @06:18AM
While the TrueCrypt question may be the technical topic (and the XKCD explanation is the most likely one), the indictment is interesting for a number of reasons.
The classified information is the smallest part of the whole adventure. What he was trying to do with it isn't clear; there are no charges that he actually sold it to anyone. The real motivation here is apparently more of a love triangle: He was intending to divorce his wife, had fallen in love with a woman from the Middle East. He apparently married the second woman and got her immigration documents before his divorce was final. Nearly all of the charges seem to revolve around this.
The indictment is the typical "piling on" of charges, with the clear intent of forcing a plea bargain rather than a trial. To this end, there are the usual charges of "structuring", which includes transactions as small $700. The monetary valuation of classified files, so that they can charge "conversion". Charging "computer intrusion" even though he was sys-admin for the computers in question. Some of the charges seem (IANAL) utterly redundant, for example, even though it's all about his new wife, he is charged with "naturalization fraud" in five different counts.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @07:10AM
What he really should have done was loaned out a whole bunch of money to people, sold the loans to two other groups of people, and then called in the loan. The government would give him billions for his trouble, and he could have got away with it, too.