FBI Tried To Defeat Encryption 10 Years Ago, Files Show (nytimes.com)

An anonymous reader shares a NYTimes article: In early 2003, F.B.I. agents hit a roadblock in a secret investigation, called Operation Trail Mix. For months, agents had been intercepting phone calls and emails belonging to members of an animal welfare group that was believed to be sabotaging operations of a company that was using animals to test drugs. But encryption software had made the emails unreadable. So investigators tried something new. They persuaded a judge to let them remotely, and secretly, install software on the group's computers to help get around the encryption. That effort, revealed in newly declassified and released records, shows in new detail how F.B.I. hackers worked to defeat encryption more than a decade before the agency's recent fight with Apple over access to a locked iPhone. The Trail Mix case was, in some ways, a precursor to the Apple dispute. In both cases, the agents could not decode the data themselves, but found a clever workaround. The Trail Mix records also reveal what is believed to be the first example of the F.B.I. remotely installing surveillance software, known as spyware or malware, as part of a criminal wiretap. 'This was the first time that the Department of Justice had ever approved such an intercept of this type,' an F.B.I. agent wrote in a 2005 document summing up the case.

Comments

This isn't "getting around the encryption"

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

"Getting around the encryption" should be "intercepting data before it got encrypted or stealing passcodes with keylogging" or some-such.

>> They persuaded a judge to let them remotely, and secretly, install software on the group's computers to help get around the encryption

I really have no problem with this. Here, the FBI went through a legal process to get permission to monitor a suspect to look for specific messages. This is a lot different than law enforcement grabbing all data passing through an area and then fishing around in people's private business for suspicious or embarrassing activity.

FSVO "defeating"

[gwolf]

Encryption (even more in such general terms, not even mentioning which algorithm or basic representing problem) has not been and cannot be "defeated" as such. It can be circumvented. And, besides some weak cryptosystems that have been proposed and found lacking after analysis (i.e. the knapsacks implementation), the only "useful" general attacks on cryptography are attacks on the implementation: Circumventing cryptography rather than breaking it.

Partial credit

[s.petry]

Had the FBI actually not broken numerous laws I may agree with you. The FBI installing illegal software without the person's knowledge is a bit different from wiretapping. First, the only way for the FBI to have this illegal software would be to create the software which is a criminal act. Alternatively, and more likely, they could have conspired with criminals to acquire the software. (It should be obvious that "criminals" could be agencies within Government(s).)

Wiretapping is legal and has some moral uses. We can correctly state that the person maintains the assumption of innocence while they are being wiretapped. Installing software to spy requires the assumption of guilt, and provides the means for the actors to create evidence.

The loss of ethics and morality in the agency makes them a gestapo, not a public police force. I'm sure that is the intent of this, and literally thousands of other cases within the last several years. It's the Government against the public, until the public takes back the Government.

Err, what?

[wonkey_monkey]

FBI Tried To Defeat Encryption 10 Years Ago, Files Show

They're probably trying to defeat encryption of some kind or another every single day.