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As Apple stands firm against requests to break iPhone encryption, many people have questioned why the FBI needs Apple’s help in the first place. There are plenty of tools available from third-party companies that are more than capable of unlocking the iPhone 5 and iPhone 7 used by the Pensacola gunman. Further emphasizing that point, a new report from Forbes says that the FBI recently used one of those black/gray market tools to unlock the newest — and theoretically the most secure — iPhone that Apple sells. According to the report, FBI investigators in Ohio used the GrayKey hardware box...

Apple previously said that it had provided all of the information in its possession (such as iCloud backups) to the FBI earlier in the month after the FBI asked for assistance obtaining the shooter's data. Law enforcement officials are not satisfied with the iCloud data, however, and want Apple to provide a way to unlock the shooter's iPhones, which is not possible without a backdoor into the software. After Barr's request, Apple issued another statement and provided further detail on the data that has been provided, as well as once again stating that there is "no such thing as a...

Attorney General William P. Barr declared on Monday that a deadly shooting last month at a naval air station in Pensacola, Fla., was an act of terrorism, and he asked Apple in an unusually high-profile request to provide access to two phones used by the gunman.Mr. Barr’s appeal was an escalation of a continuing fight between the Justice Department and Apple pitting personal privacy against public safety. “This situation perfectly illustrates why it is critical that the public be able to get access to digital evidence,” Mr. Barr said, calling on technology companies to find a solution and complaining that...

The Burr-Feinstein antiencryption bill isn't just bad, it's evidence of a dangerous incompetence in congressional leadership that is undermining America’s security. In fact, the draft bill, leaked two weeks ago and now officially released, is compelling evidence that Senate leadership should strip – or at least not reappoint – Senators Burr and Feinstein of their positions on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Amongst its many provisions, the draft bill mandates that tech companies make all of our online data "intelligible" when presented with a court order. The bill defines intelligible as "decrypted, deciphered, decoded, demodulated, or deobfuscated" to "the...

If you heard the reverberation of a few thousand heads exploding last week, it was the sound of information security professionals reacting to US Attorney General Barr saying that Big Tech "can and must" put backdoors into encryption. In his speech for a cybersecurity conference at Fordham University, Barr warned tech companies that time was running out for them to develop ways for the government to break encryption. FBI Director Christopher Wray agreed with him. At this week's big meeting of the "Five Eyes" countries, Barr was in attendance. His demands that internet companies break safe security standards of encryption...

Federal authorities on Wednesday announced a terrorist case against a metro Atlanta resident accused of plotting to destroy the White House and other Washington D.C. government buildings. Hasher Jallal Taheb, of Cumming, was arrested in Gwinnett County and appeared briefly in court in downtown Atlanta in the case brought the FBI.

In a move supported by both major political parties in Australia, a bill named the “Telecommunications Assistance and Access Bill 2018,” has passed the House of Representatives and is headed to the upper House for a vote. Given its bi-partisan support and the position of PM Michael Turnbull regarding encryption, passage into law seems certain. A Hacker News article provides additional details about the bill and its ramifications, not only for tech companies like Apple, Samsung, WhatsApp, Signal and others but also for individuals. The intended purpose of the legislation is to give the Australian government and security and law...

A U.S. Treasury Department official has been criminally charged with leaking confidential documents relating to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, the Russian embassy and others, to a reporter from digital media company BuzzFeed, Manhattan federal prosecutors announced on Wednesday. Natalie May Edwards, a senior adviser in the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), was arrested on Tuesday and charged with unauthorized disclosure of suspicious activity reports, according to the office of U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman. She was expected to make an initial appearance in Virginia federal court later in the day.

The FBI has repeatedly provided grossly inflated statistics to Congress and the public about the extent of problems posed by encrypted cellphones, claiming investigators were locked out of nearly 7,800 devices connected to crimes last year when the correct number was much smaller, probably between 1,000 and 2,000, The Washington Post has learned. Over a period of seven months, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray cited the inflated figure as the most compelling evidence for the need to address what the FBI calls “Going Dark” — the spread of encrypted software that can block investigators’ access to digital data even with...

New evidence suggests that a former top staffer for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) may be directing the post-election efforts of Fusion GPS, a Democrat-linked political opposition research firm, to vindicate a series of memos alleging illegal collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and Russian officials

Harold Thomas Martin, a 51-year-old US National Security Agency contractor from Maryland, may be remembered as the second Edward Snowden, although there are many differences between the two cases. Martin, a former US Navy officer with top secret national security clearance, was arrested on Aug. 27 by the FBI and charged with the unauthorized removal and retention for many years of highly-sensitive classified documents. The purloined materials found in raids of his home and his car, which were described by as capable of causing “exceptionally grave damage” to US national security. Like Snowden, Martin worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, which...

Mark Warner was texting a Russian oligarch using an encrypted app, Signal, and his messages were set to automatically delete. FoxNews broke a huge story about Senator Mark Warner, which has been discussed elsewhere. What I haven’t seen anyone else cover is the fact that the “text messages” were not ordinary messages. Warner was communicating via Signal, an encrypted app. Moreover, Warner had his messages set to disappear. (The hour glass icon in the text exchange.)

Good evening, I’m still reporting on: FBI Baffled by Encryption, 1978 Synopsis: New FBI Director Christopher Wray, speaking on Tuesday at a cyber-security conference in New York, said that powerful encryption tools now becoming widely available are frustrating his agency. Surprise, surprise; last year, the FBI was unable to access data from 7800 devices – that’s over 50% - despite having legal authority to do so – i.e. a legitimate warrant from a real judge. Wray warned the audience of cyber-security experts from around the world: “This is an urgent public safety issue. [The solution] is not so clear cut.”...

Agents of the federal government have been sending coded messages to one another, but they aren’t deep-cover spies evading the Russian spooks or transmitting North Korean launch codes. They are run-of-the-mill bureaucrats who appear to be using digital technology to evade the American people and their representatives in Congress and the White House. “There’s no elected control if the bureaucrats can have conversations that are not reviewable by elected officials,” said John Vecchione, president and CEO of the Cause of Action Institute (COA). “They can’t control the bureaucracy.” Vecchione’s group filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request earlier this...

As soon as the news broke last week that the FBI was unable to gain access to the phone belonging to the Sutherland Springs, Texas killer, you could hear the indignant feet-stomping of security hawks on Capitol Hill. It did not matter that the killer was not a member of ISIS, and acted alone. It did not matter that the motive was a domestic dispute, not the result of some broader terrorist plot. And, it did not matter that it was the government’s clerical error in the first place, which allowed for this tragedy to occur.There was data to be...

At a press conference today, an FBI official investigating the man who killed 26 people in a Texas church on Sunday said the agency can't open the shooter's encrypted phone. The agent painted the issue as a growing concern among law enforcement at all levels who can't access data on devices without their owner's credentials. It's essentially the same argument the FBI made two years ago when it demanded Apple help break into the phone of the San Bernardino shooter, a conflict that escalated into the courtroom.

A top Justice Department official on Tuesday criticized technology companies that "enable criminals and terrorists" with encryption software and foreshadowed a new government approach to the issue that has increasingly frustrated law enforcement."When investigations of violent criminal organizations come to a halt because we cannot access a phone, lives may be lost," Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said..."The approach taken in the recent past--negotiating with technology companies and hoping that they eventually will assist law enforcement out of a sense of civic duty--is unlikely to work," he said.Though he did not outline future steps, Rosenstein, seemed to be taking up..a...

Turkish police said on Tuesday they are seeking 144 people including police, soldiers and prosecutors, over suspected links to the network of a US-based cleric blamed by Ankara for orchestrating last year’s failed coup. In raids across 42 provinces, 35 of the 144 wanted people have already been detained, the police said in a statement, adding that the suspects were thought to be using ByLock, an encrypted messaging app the government says was used by preacher Fethullah Gulen’s followers. Turkey accuses Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile for almost 20 years, of running a decades-long campaign to overthrow the...

In early December 2016, Adam was doing what he’s always doing, somewhere between hobby and profession: looking for things that are on the internet that shouldn’t be. That week, he came across a server inside New York University’s famed Institute for Mathematics and Advanced Supercomputing, headed by the brilliant Chudnovsky brothers, David and Gregory. The server appeared to be an internet-connected backup drive. But instead of being filled with family photos and spreadsheets, this drive held confidential information on an advanced code-breaking machine that had never before been described in public. Dozens of documents spanning hundreds of pages detailed the...

In a rebuke to the anti-encryption campaign waged by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation--with Apple as a target--the U.S. House Judiciary Committee's Encryption Working Group issued a report today stating "any measure that weakens encryption works against the national interest." In a bipartisan report, the group observed that "any measure that weakens encryption works against the national interest," citing representatives of the national security community who noted that "strong encryption is vital to the national defense and to securing vital assets, such as critical infrastructure." A second finding of the report was that "encryption technology is a global technology...