- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
FBI, Federal Judge Agree Fighting Botnets Means Allowing The FBI To Remotely Install Software On People’s Computers::The ends aren’t always supposed to justify the means. And a federal agency that already raised the hackles of defense lawyers around the nation during a CSAM investigation probably shouldn’t be in this much of hurry to start sending out unsolicited software to unknowing recipients. But that’s the way things work now. As a result…
You must log in or register to comment.
Meh, this is overblown.
They seized the control servers of the malware operation, used that to send an update destroying the bots, after getting a warrant to do so. In the article it makes it seem like they searched everyone’s computer, even though the warrant explicitly forbade them from doing so, saw the bot software and then targeted them. This is not the case.
The warrant explicitly forbade the FBI from searching the computers they for the warrant for. The article implies that they could violate the warrant if they want to. And they could. But by that logic any warrant can be abused, let’s just get rid of warrants. And the issue at hand, that the court issued the warrant, is being glossed over on this point. The FBI had this capability, they’ll abuse it warrant or no if they’re trying to abuse it. The warrant makes no difference. So why even bring up the warrant?
It’s not overblown, they are modifying people’s systems without their knowledge or consent, a warrant to do so should never have been granted. Whether their intent was good or not is irrelevant.
This smells of a case where they are looking to broaden their reach through precedence. They now can modify peoples systems if a judge feels it’s “good” to do so.
They uninstalled a malicious bot-net from people’s machines that they never consented to either. The bot-net posed a serious and persistent threat to essentially everyone on the internet.
While having law enforcement writing code to run on people’s machines unwittingly is definitely extreme and absolutely should be heavily scrutinized, leaving the bot-net active is not a better option. And in this case law enforcement has been public about their actions so there’s plenty of opportunity for what happened to be reviewed.
Yeah, this is a weird one in my opinion. I don’t like either option, but I guess if they told the malware to effectively self destruct, then IMO that’s okay, with the caveat that the FBI leaves some indicator behind that allows users to know that this happened on their machine.
Communicating what happened and how they would do that is an interesting problem. Knowing which machines are infected is simple because they were contacting the control servers regularly. Knowing where the machines are and who they belong to is not. I suspect it would a lot of work and expense to discover the physical addresses of all the machines to communicate officially outside of leaving something on their computer, and writing software to leave some kind of official “calling card” behind that would inform the user what happened is neither trivial and would likely also be upsetting to people. Most would assume the message itself is some kind of scam or mal-ware itself. I’d personally still want to know, especially since I might have the actual mal-ware on backups or other infected machines that are offline, but I’m not altogether surprised if they chose not to inform the users at all.
It doesn’t matter if what they did had good intentions or that they made their actions public after they modified people’s systems. The precedent this sets is that anything that a judge feels is “bad” can be removed from your system.
The intentions and the specifics of the granted warrant does matter. It’s like someone placed a bunch of remotely controlled booby-traps in homes across the city. Law enforcement discovers the booby-traps and knows all the homes involved, and that the threat is real and imminent. Granting a warrant allowing law enforcement to remove the traps before someone is injured is not unreasonable.
The scope of the warrant is very specific… they can enter the property to remove the threat, and for no other purpose. That would not be unreasonable and nobody is going to complain that LE wasn’t acting in everyone’s best interest, even if residents didn’t consent to having the booby-trap removed. Nobody wants it and it poses a continuous threat while present. Removing it asap is the right thing to do.
My turn for a straw man, it’s like the FBI adding local dns entries to your system so you can’t go to porn sites because one judge thinks porn is bad for everyone and stopping people from watching porn is good.
Removed by mod
This wasn’t an urgent crisis, the victims should have been notified before their privacy was infringed upon.
Breaking into someone’s computer without their consent is wrong no matter the reason.
Relying on a judge’s discression as to what is safe and what is good before you break into someone’s computer is a terrible idea. There’s a current federal judge that thought Firefox was a search engine, he’s one in a pool of federal judges that would be approving FBI requests to fix you computer for your own good.
Like trying to reduce the number of different industry standards by creating your own standard.
Soon…There is now an additional botnet.
I am all for freedom and generally against empowering the government keeping in mind the potential for abuse and other consequences. But in this case I don’t think we should prevent them. It should be scrutinized to make it harder to abuse but it’s a necessity for national security.
Edit: i will assume that tankies didn’t like the national security aspect of my comment since they want us to fail
