The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation's top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.
Law-enforcement officials in the U.S. are expanding the use of tools routinely used by computer hackers to gather information on suspects, bringing the criminal wiretap into the cyber age.
Federal agencies have largely kept quiet about these capabilities, but court documents and interviews with people involved in the programs provide new details about the hacking tools, including spyware delivered to computers and phones through email or Web links—techniques more commonly associated with attacks by criminals.
A young Icelandic boy's journey as an informant all began with a cryptic e-mail sent to the United States Embassy in Reykjavík from Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson (Sigurður Ingi Þórðarsson), then an 18-year-old.
Thordarson had been involved with WikiLeaks during the previous 18 months, moving ever-closer to the inner circle of the group—Julian Assange eventually promoted him to running the group’s IRC channel, and he was put in charge of dealing with newcomers, media, and other volunteers.
A website that accepts payment in exchange for knocking other sites offline is perfectly legal, the proprietor of the DDoS-for-hire service says. Oh, it also contains a backdoor that's actively monitored by the FBI.
An Arizona judge has denied a motion to suppress evidence collected through a spoofed cell tower that the FBI used to track the location of an accused identity thief.
The ruling means that the government may use not only evidence gathered through its fake cell tower to locate an air card that Daniel David Rigmaiden was using to access the internet, but also evidence gathered from the apartment to which they tracked him through the air card and evidence collected from a storage space and computer hard drives found in the apartment and storage locker.
Last week, the press focused on Katherine Russell, the widow of Boston bombing suspect Tamarlan Tsarnaev, as officials have been trying to determine what she knew about the bombing.
After investigators found "al-Qaeda's Inspire magazine and other radical Islamist material on her computer," they focused on phone calls between Russell and her husband to determine if she participated in the plot.
At 8:05am on the morning of December 1, 2010, an FBI search warrant team swarmed up to a Silicon Valley home on an unusual misson: find the "sextortionist" who had been blackmailing pro poker players over the Internet. One agent pounded on the door and shouted out, "FBI!" Movement was heard inside, but no one opened the door. The agent knocked again, but the door stayed shut, so out came the battering ram. Wham—the door gave and FBI agents flooded inside, guns drawn in the dim light.
A federal magistrate judge has denied (PDF) a request from the FBI to install sophisticated surveillance software to track someone suspected of attempting to conduct a “sizeable wire transfer from [John Doe’s] local bank [in Texas] to a foreign bank account.”
Back in March 2013, the FBI asked the judge to grant a month-long “Rule 41 search and seizure warrant” of a suspect’s computer “at premises unknown” as a way to find out more about this possible violations of “federal bank fraud, identity theft and computer security laws.”
Federal law enforcement officials are reporting a rise in attacks in which the telephone lines of emergency call centers are flooded with bogus calls by extortionists whose demands for cash are refused.
In an Arizona court case, the FBI has been forced to defend its use of a phony cellphone tower dubbed Stingray that it's using to analyse mobile phone traffic and identify suspects.
The Stingray system came to light in the case of Daniel David Rigmaiden, who stands accused of reaping millions of dollars from filing phony tax returns on the basis of identity theft. The FBI were able to catch Rigmaiden in 2008 by tracking down the 3G card he was using as a modem, but it didn't disclose that the Stingray had been used in this process without a warrant.
