by Virgil Vaduva

Last week I covered the story of the FBI asking a federal judge to order Apple to insert a back-door into iOS in order to gain the ability to brute force the password and encryption keys of the San Bernardino shooter, and I concluded that Apple rightly said ‘No’ to the demand, pointing out how this would establish an extremely dangerous technical and legal precedent.

It turns out that I was right, and so was Apple’s CEO, when stating that undermining the security of iOS would destroy confidence in the security of their products and give the FBI the ability to undermine the privacy of any iPhone user at the FBI’s discretion. In essence, Apple is literally fighting for its life as doing so would cause customers to abandon Apple products in droves.

Now it turns out that the Justice Department now has filed additional motions asking courts to force Apple to undermine the security of 12 more iPhones related to unknown legal cases throughout the country. The undisclosed cases are not related to terrorism, which means that the FBI director outright lied when he stated that the case of the San Bernardino shooter was the one and only case in which Apple would be required to insert a “backdoor” into their operating system.

Apple no longer stores encryption keys for user devices and keys are now derived based on the passwords or passphrases users choose when they lock their devices. This means that it is technically impossible for Apple to “decrypt” an iOS device, however the FBI has asked Apple to build a custom iOS release which disabled the auto-wipe feature and the waiting period required between failed password, which in essence would allow the FBI to mount brute-force attacks against an encrypted device and eventually guess the password and decrypt the device.

In addition to the court order in the San Bernardino case, Apple also revealed that they in fact provided the FBI with decrypted, weekly backups of the shooters phone, however the FBI demanded the latest backup, which they were unable to obtain after one of their own agents reset the suspect’s password making the backup unusable. After screwing up the forensic recovery, the FBI resorted to attempting to force Apple to provide technical assistance beyond any reasonable expectations.

These latest revelations clearly indicate that the FBI director Brien Comey outright lied when stating that Apple will be required to decrypt only one device, and while Apple has not made a public comment about these additional cases, the court filing indicate that they objected to all of them or are about to do so.

Apple has until Friday, February 26 to file its first legal arguments in a California court.

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak. He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.

by Virgil Vaduva

For all the criticism Apple receives from users about its products, design or pricing, there is one thing that Apple should be commended for, namely the focus on security of their users’ data and implementation of encryption across all their mobile devices by default. In fact both Apple and Google now enable full device encryption by default on all devices running iOS version 8 or Android Marshmallow (version 6); this means that full disk encryption will be mandatory for all users.

This decision has broad implications from a security perspective: devices which are stolen or lost will be safe from malicious users which attempt to recover data from them via brute force attacks against a users’ password, causing the device to be “wiped out.”  Malicious users will also be unable to mount the encrypted volume of a device in order to read data from it.

Of course, the government has a problem with this.

The recent case of the San Bernardino shooting spree is what brings us here. One of the shooters’ iPhone (model 5c) was encrypted and the FBI is unable to brute force the password. And when the FBI cannot get it their way, they go to a judge and ask for a piece of paper that would force someone to help them out, in this case, Apple.

In a document titled “Order compelling Apple Inc to Assist Agents in Search,” a Federal magistrate ordered Apple to take several steps to undermine the security of the suspect’s iPhone.

SB Shooter Order Compelling Apple Asst iPhone

The steps demanded in the order including (1) bypassing the auto-erase feature, (2) allow the FBI to repeatedly submit passwords to unlock the device and (3) eliminate the delay introduced by using incorrect passwords.  If you don’t think that is bad enough, the FBI is even demanding a custom-built iOS release which has the three features specified above disabled, hard-coded with the phone’s UDID that can be loaded on the phone via the native Device Firmware Upgrade method, which would allow the FBI to continue brute-force attempts against the device.

This order is unprecedented and a blatant overreach (as usual) by the FBI investigators. Without any evidence that the phone contains any data useful to their investigation, the FBI is attempting to force a corporate entity to spend time and resources to build a custom operating system to subvert most of the security controls originally implemented in the OS.

The good news is that Apple said no. Yesterday,  Apple’s CEO Tim Cook wrote a public letter excoriating the FBI for their request and explaining how this is an unprecedented attack on the privacy of all mobile device users and also an attack on Apple’s ability to design and release secure software. In no uncertain terms, Cook said that Apple will oppose this order and the company will not comply with it:

While we believe the FBI’s intentions are good, it would be wrong for the government to force us to build a backdoor into our products. And ultimately, we fear that this demand would undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect.

The future will tell how far the FBI is willing to go to pursue their schemes. Will they arrest Apple employees if they refuse to comply? Will they fine Apple?

And what dangerous precedent will this establish? If anything good will come out of it, I am hoping that it will force both Apple and Google to build even more secure devices, which will be impervious to such out of band attacks in the future, even with orders from Federal judges.

I wholly support Apple for their stance on privacy and security, and so should you.

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak. He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.

On Thursday, December 10th, 2015, two NYPD detectives interrogated me in the hallway of my apartment building under the suspicion that I supported the Islamic State. I let the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force into my living room five days later so they could do the same thing. The whole process was stressful and infuriating, but I refuse to identify as the victim of this story. Instead, please send your sympathies to the fear-riddled soul who turned me in. He or she caught me reading a widely-circulated news story about the Islamic extremist group ISIS while I was aboard an airplane, and called the authorities.

Here’s how this all to came to pass. It was shaping up to be a lazy evening at home with cocktails and friends when my door buzzer rang at 9:30. The voice crackled through: “This is the police. We need you to let us in right now.” I buzzed them in, turned down the music, and pondered everything I’ve done in the last year that could’ve been illegal.

When they arrived at the door, the two plainclothes detectives asked for me by name: “We need to speak to Aaron Saltzman.” After they showed me their badges and I showed them my ID, the questions came quickly and with the predictability of an 1980s cop flick.

“Were you on a flight from Tampa on the 21st of November?”

“Um, yes.”

“Which airline did you take?”

“Maybe JetBlue?”

“Maybe it was JetBlue? How do you not recall exactly? And why do you look so nervous?”

“When two police detectives show up at your door, nervousness is not an unreasonable response.”

“What were you doing on that flight?”

“Sleeping, probably.”

This line of questioning continued for another ten minutes: what did I do for a living, where did I do it, how long had I been doing it. I finally told them I wanted a lawyer before answering any more of their queries. They had just one more question before leaving.

For context, I’m a white guy who works in the entertainment industry, no flag-waving political revolutionary. My only associations with the Middle East was a two-week trip to Israel in August of 2009, a trip that included a few days of laying on the beach in Northern Egypt. I “support” Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but it’s mostly for laughs and to get a rise out of my more-liberal friends online. I’m a Jewish kid who lives in Brooklyn — do you think I sympathize with ISIS?

I pieced it together while we stood there in the hallway. I had spent part of that fated flight reading an article in The Atlantic titled “What ISIS Really Wants.” I was reading news and being questioned about it.

The header image is a red and orange photo with an ISIS fighter holding his gun in the air. It’s jarring, but it’s certainly no worse than how any other news outlet would choose artwork for their stories related to the terrorist group. The cops were unamused.

“Funny how you first said you were sleeping, and now you’re telling us you were reading something related to the Islamic State.”

I walked back into my house at a loss for words. It’s no longer unique or special to be targeted by overzealous, militarized bureaucracies. People of color, most women, and the LGBT community can identify with my surreal experience, though on a more disturbing, chronic level. I was and still am very confused.

On Tuesday the 15th, it happened again. I woke up that morning to a phone call from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, informing me that they needed to come by my house to speak to me. I let them in around 11 AM — I wanted this done once and for all.

The agents were marginally more understanding than the NYPD detectives, but they also ended things with one final question:“Do you have any deep issues with the United States of America?”

I gave my answer with sincerity: “I am America’s biggest fan.”

In reality, I had a few issues with the America I was living in, and these cops and federal agents who walked intimidatingly through my front door each of those mornings brought the biggest one of all with them: fear. Fear has been the emotional engine powering most of this country’s troubled moments. Consider the McCarthyism of the 1950s, the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s. Fear leads us to panic and call the police on our neighbors.

America is close to electing a new president, and fear is powerful enough to be a trigger on both sides of the aisle. Just as my beloved Donald Trump makes sweeping, fear-filled anti-immigrant statements, Bernie Sanders wails that if we don’t solve the problems of big banks now, we are doomed. Each exploits an environment of fear to his advantage, but neither created it. All of us create it; it’s a blend of hate, anger, and anxiety that is constantly fed by everyone from senators to bartenders, which is then amplified by the media and sold back to us as pointed infotainment. When everyone is yelling, no one is listening.

We are stuck in a feedback loop. News outlets reports on what gets ratings, just as companies sell whatever makes them money. In a world of total media saturation, we are becoming addicted to outrage porn. When do we acknowledge our habits with smut-grade news media is hurting society in a real way?

When we calm down, and think clearly, we can find answers together. We, as a society, have moved companies like Nike and Apple to implement better working conditions for their laborers. We have influenced grocery stores to carry healthier food at more affordable prices. We have glamorized “going green” as a popular, selfless path for any business to take. What kind of emoji will it take for us to elevate the state of our public discourse? Even when we don’t agree, we can set a common agenda and find answers through the fog. We have done it before.

In President Obama’s final State of the Union address this month, he shared his biggest regret of his presidency: a growing divide between our political parties. We all complain about the inefficiency of Washington and its constant political gridlock, yet we proudly declare how many “ignorant morons” we unfriended on Facebook for sharing views that don’t line up with our own. Stop the de-friending, stop closing your ears to opposing views, and stop writing people off so quickly. Perhaps the person who vehemently disagrees with you does so not out of malice, but simply out of patriotism. Put the burden on yourself to find validity in what they say, even if you have to look hard to unearth it. Opinions only reflect our life experiences; they’re going to be varied and diverse by default.

Our citizenry need to be able to  discuss big issues in a sober manner. Instead, we tend to grab our figurative pitchforks of revolution and wave them in the air. We have to decide what kind of society we want to live in, and I don’t think it’s one in which we are calling the FBI to report strangers on airplanes for trying to stay informed.

Aaron Saltzman is the manager of YOUNG & SICK. You can contact Aaron at aaronsaltzman.com, or join his email list here.

WASHINGTON — For nearly two weeks last year, the FBI operated what it described as one of the Internet’s largest child pornography websites, allowing users to download thousands of illicit images and videos from a government site in the Washington suburbs.

The operation — whose details remain largely secret — was at least the third time in recent years that FBI agents took control of a child pornography site but left it online in an attempt to catch users who officials said would otherwise remain hidden behind an encrypted and anonymous computer network. In each case, the FBI infected the sites with software that punctured that security, allowing agents to identify hundreds of users.

The Justice Department acknowledged in court filings that the FBI operated the site, known as Playpen, from Feb. 20 to March 4, 2015. At the time, the site had more than 215,000 registered users and included links to more than 23,000 sexually explicit images and videos of children, including more than 9,000 files that users could download directly from the FBI. Some of the images described in court filings involved children barely old enough for kindergarten.

That approach is a significant departure from the government’s past tactics for battling online child porn, in which agents were instructed that they should not allow images of children being sexually assaulted to become public. The Justice Department has said that children depicted in such images are harmed each time they are viewed, and once those images leave the government’s control, agents have no way to prevent them from being copied and re-copied to other parts of the internet.

Officials acknowledged those risks, but said they had no other way to identify the people accessing the sites.

“We had a window of opportunity to get into one of the darkest places on Earth, and not a lot of other options except to not do it,” said Ron Hosko, a former senior FBI official who was involved in planning one of the agency’s first efforts to take over a child porn site. “There was no other way we could identify as many players.”

Lawyers for child pornography victims expressed surprise that the FBI would agree to such tactics – in part because agents had rejected them in the past – but nonetheless said they approved. “These are places where people know exactly what they’re getting when they arrive,” said James Marsh, who represents some of the children depicted in some of the most widely-circulated images. “It’s not like they’re blasting it out to the world.”

The FBI hacks have drawn repeated – though so far unsuccessful – legal challenges, largely centered on the search warrants agents obtained before agents cracked the computer network.

But they have also prompted a backlash of a different kind. In a court filing, a lawyer for one of the men arrested after the FBI sting charged that “what the government did in this case is comparable to flooding a neighborhood with heroin in the hope of snatching an assortment of low-level drug users.” The defense lawyer, Colin Fieman, asked a federal judge to throw out child pornography charges against his client, former middle school teacher Jay Michaud. A federal judge is scheduled to hear arguments on that request Friday.

Federal agents first noticed Playpen not long after it went online in August, 2014. The site was buried in what is often called the “dark web,” a part of the internet that is accessible to the public only through Tor, network software that bounces users’ internet traffic from one computer to another to make it largely untraceable.

By March of last year, the FBI said, Playpen had grown to become “the largest remaining known child pornography hidden service in the world,” the Justice Department said in a court filing. FBI agents tracked the site to computer servers in North Carolina, and in February seized the site and quietly moved it to its own facility inNewington, Va.

The FBI kept Playpen online for 13 days. During that time, federal prosecutors told defense lawyers that the site included more than 23,000 sexually explicit images and videos of children. Some of those could be downloaded directly from the government’s computers; others were available through links to other hard-to-find locations on the web, Fieman said.

One section of the site was labeled “toddlers,” according to court records. And prosecutors said that some of the images users accessed during the time Playpen was under the government’s control included “prepubescent female” having sexual intercourse with adults.

Fieman said more than 100,000 Playpen registered users visited the site while it was under the FBI’s control. The Justice Department said in court filings that agents had found “true” computer addresses for more than 1,300 of them, and has told defense lawyers that 137 have been charged with a crime, though it has so far declined to publicly identify those cases.

Law enforcement has long complained that online services like Tor create a type of safe haven for criminals because they hide the unique network addresses from which people connect to sites on the internet. Officials said the only way for the government to crack that network was to take over the site and infect it with malware that would trick users’ web browsers into revealing their real internet addresses, which agents could then trace back to the people who were using them.

“The government always considers seizing an illegal child pornography site and removing it from existence immediately and permanently,” Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr said. “While doing so would end the trafficking of child pornography taking place on that one website, it would do nothing to prevent those same users from disseminating child pornography through other means.”

Still, he said, “The decision whether to simply shut down a website or to allow it to continue operating for a brief period for a law enforcement purpose is a difficult one.”

Justice officials said they were unable to discuss details of the investigation because much of it remains under seal, at their request.

The Justice Department said in court filings that agents did not post any child pornography to the site themselves. But it did not dispute that the agents allowed images that were already on the site to remain there, and that it did not block the site’s users from uploading new ones while it was under the government’s control. And the FBI has not said it had any ability to prevent users from circulating the material they downloaded onto other sites.

“At some point, the government investigation becomes indistinguishable from the crime, and we should ask whether that’s OK,” said Elizabeth Joh, a University of California Davis law professor who has studied undercover investigations. “What’s crazy about it is who’s making the cost/benefit analysis on this? Who decides that this is the best method of identifying these people?”

The FBI was first known to have operated a child porn site in 2012, when agents seized control of three sites from their operator in Nebraska. FBI Special Agent Jeff Tarpinian testified that the government “relocated two servers to an FBI facility here in Omaha and we continued to let those child pornography run – websites operate for a short period of time.”

That case led to federal child pornography charges against at least 25 people. But in an illustration of how difficult the cases can be, at least nine of the people charged in those cases are still identified in court records only as “John Doe,” suggesting the FBI has so far been unable to link specific people to the network addresses it logged.

The next year, the FBI took control of a dark web site known as Freedom Hosting. The man prosecutors have accused of operating that site, Eric Marques, is due to be extradited to the United States; the charges against him remain sealed. The FBI revealed its role in an Irish court hearing covered by local media.

In each case, the FBI injected the site with malware to crack Tor’s anonymity.

Those hacks, developed with the help of outside contractors, were a technical milestone. When the FBI first realized it could break through Tor, Hosko said the agency gathered counterterrorism investigators and intelligence agencies to see if any of them had a more pressing need for the software. “It was this, exponentially,” Hosko said.

Twice in recent days, FBI Director James B. Comey has stepped to a podium here and asserted that police across the nation are reluctant to aggressively enforce the law in the post-Ferguson era of smartphones and YouTube.

And twice his comments have drawn disagreement and derision from a host of sources, including civil rights activists, law enforcement officials and, on Monday, the White House.

“The available evidence at this point does not support the notion that law enforcement officers around the country are shying away from fulfilling their responsibilities,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday at a news briefing in Washington. “The evidence that we’ve seen so far doesn’t support the contention that law enforcement officials are somehow shirking their responsibility.”

Comey, nonetheless, stayed the course, telling thousands of police officials gathered here for a conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police that a violent crime wave is gripping the nation’s major cities. And he suggested that police officers themselves are in part to blame, made gun shy by the prospect of getting caught on the next video of alleged police brutality.

The “age of viral videos” has fundamentally altered U.S. policing, Comey said Monday in a speech virtually identical to one he delivered last week at the University of Chicago Law School.

His comments have been interpreted as giving credence to the notion of a “Ferguson effect” — the theory that riots and racial unrest in places such as Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, where police killed civilians, has prompted police officers to become more restrained. That, in turn, has theoretically resulted in an uptick in violent crime as criminals become emboldened.

Comey acknowledged Monday that he has little evidence to support the theory.

“The question is, are these kinds of things changing police behavior around the country? The honest answer is: I don’t know for sure whether that’s the case,” he said, but he added that “I do have a strong sense” it’s true.

It’s “the one theory that to my mind and to my common sense does explain” rising rates of urban violence in 2015.

Coming from the nation’s top law enforcement official, the remarks have landed like a bombshell in criminal-justice circles, offending people across the political spectrum. Civil rights groups and activists have taken deep exception to the idea that crime rates might be linked to protests against police brutality.

Amnesty International USA Executive Director Steven Hawkins called Comey’s comments “outrageous” and “unsubstantiated.”

Policing groups, meanwhile, have been equally infuriated by the assertion that their officers have been somehow derelict in their duties, frightened by teenagers with cellphone cameras.

“Time and time again [Comey] generalizes about a segment of the population that he knows nothing about,” said James O. Pasco Jr., executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police. “He has never been a police officer.”

Comey is “like the scarecrow in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” Pasco said. “He wanders around pretending to be smart and then at the end they give him a diploma and he thinks he’s a genius. They swear him in as the director of the FBI and all of a sudden he’s an expert on what police officers are thinking.”

The speeches also have put Comey at odds with the White House, as President Obama is eager to take credit for lowering the crime rate.

As Comey was preparing to deliver his address Friday, Obama was hosting a criminal-justice forum at the White House, where he celebrated “incredible, historic reductions in crime over the last 20 years.”

“I know that there’s been some talk in the press about spikes that are happening this year relative to last year. I’ve asked my team to look very carefully at it — Attorney General [Loretta E.] Lynch has pulled together a task force — and it does look like there are a handful of cities where we’re seeing higher-than-normal spikes,” Obama said at the time. However, he added, “across the 93 or 95 top cities, it’s very hard to distinguish anything statistically meaningful.”

In his speech Monday, Comey also urged law enforcement leaders to stop engaging in an us-vs.- them tug of war with protesters from Black Lives Matter, the group that sprung up in the wake of the August 2014 shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer in Ferguson.

Instead, Comey said, police chiefs should use the budding protest movement as a window into the minds of those they are charged with protecting.

“There is a line of law enforcement and a line of communities we serve, especially communities of color,” Comey said. “Each time somebody interprets ‘hashtag Black Lives Matter’ as anti-law-enforcement, one line moves away. And each time someone interprets ‘hashtag Police Lives Matter’ as anti-black, the other line moves away.”

Comey’s comments come weeks after he held a session with 100 city leaders and law enforcement officials from across the nation. At that meeting, many — including Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) — reported that police morale was sinking in their towns amid ongoing scrutiny.

“We have allowed our police department to get fetal, and it is having a direct consequence,” Emanuel said during the meeting. “They have pulled back from the ability to interdict. . . . They don’t want to be a news story themselves. They don’t want their career ended early. And it’s having an impact.”

Comey said such feedback has served as inspiration for his recent speeches, in which he declared that violent-crime rates are being inflated by “a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement over the last year.”

“That wind is surely changing behavior,” Comey said, later adding: “We need to figure out what’s happening and deal with it now. I refuse to wait. . . . These aren’t data points — these are lives.”

In his speech, Comey also contradicted what has been the administration’s stance on the incarceration of thousands of men and women in the 1980s and 1990s related to the national drug war.

“Each drug dealer, each mugger, each killer and each felon with a gun had his own lawyer, his own case, his own time before judge and jury, his own sentencing, and, in many cases, an appeal or other post-sentencing review,” Comey said. “There were thousands and thousands of those individual cases, but to speak of ‘mass incarceration,’ I believe, is confusing, and it distorts an important reality.”

The Obama administration has worked to undo many of the policies that are credited with spurring a period of “mass incarceration,” and has boasted that 2014 was the first year in modern history that both the crime rate and number of federal prisoners declined.

“I can’t speak to the range of Director Comey’s views on this topic,” Earnest said when asked about Comey’s remarks on mass incarceration. “The president certainly does believe that there are certain elements of the criminal-justice system that are not serving the country in communities all across the country very well.”

Despite increasingly heated rhetoric from opponents of government surveillance, a recent survey shows that most Americans would be okay with many kinds of Internet snooping as long as the snoopers told them first.

The results showed “a surprising willingness by participants to accept the inspection of encrypted traffic, provided they are first notified,” according to the researchers behind the survey, which was titled “At Least Tell Me.”

Although the respondents put up with surveillance, half of them said that they believed it constituted an invasion of privacy.

Surveillance tools can create security vulnerabilities that permit hacking, illegal spying, privacy violations, and identity theft. But around 75 percent of respondents agreed that Internet service providers should be allowed to surveil traffic as long they notified users and received consent.

Most respondents also agreed that employers should be able to monitor the encrypted Internet connections of employees even without notification or consent, especially when an employee used a company computer. There was less agreement when it came to employees using personal devices; approximately a third of respondents opposed surveillance in that case.

In other situations—using the Internet at schools, in libraries, and on public Wi-Fi—most respondents said that surveillance was fine as long as they were told that it was happening.

The one exception to the overall trend in the survey involved warrantless government surveillance, but even that issue exposed a sharp divide.

Half of respondents objected outright to such spying. But 10 percent accepted it without qualification, another 10 percent said it was acceptable with notification, and a quarter of respondents said it was acceptable with consent.

The survey asked specifically about TLS interception proxies, software that intercepts and examines encrypted Internet traffic. Such proxies are used for protecting computers against malware, identity theft, and surveillance. Anyone with enough money can buy a TLS proxy. The same technique can be replicated with fake security certificates, rogue authorities, or clever attacks.

Despite accepting surveillance in a number of situations, 60 percent of respondents said that they would react negatively if they discovered that a network they currently use employed TLS proxies.

“I would be angry and would feel that organization violated my trust,” one anonymous responder said. “I would wonder what information that organization had been collecting on me and what they planned to do with it. If it was my employer, I also would think that organization did not trust me and would consider working somewhere else.”

Most respondents said that trade-offs often made surveillance acceptable because it could help schools and workplaces while defending against hackers.

The researchers described “confusion, doubt, worry, equivocation, and reasoned conclusions” among the participants as they wrestled with the big questions of privacy and security.

“I think it is perfectly acceptable for organizations (companies, schools, libraries, etc.) to use TLS proxies because it protects their computers,” one participant wrote.

“It keeps hackers from getting to sensitive or confidential information of the organization. In addition, it blocks harmful viruses that can cause a lot of damage and expense in repair. It can also keep individuals from accessing websites (employees from playing online games or minors from accessing pornography). It is perfectly reasonable for companies to employee this device for these purposes when an individual is using their computer. We should not expect privacy when we are using someone else’s computer.”

Approximately 90 percent of the survey’s 1,976 respondents were American. The researchers conducted the survey online earlier this year. Respondents skewed toward young adult, single, childless males, most of whom considered themselves Internet security savvy.

From The Daily Dot

After years of not giving a damn and letting the public do its job for it, the FBI is apparently ready to get serious about collecting stats on “police-involved shootings.” In a statement released along with the FBI’s 2014 Crime Report (tl;dr: most crime down again), FBI director James Comey says the agency will be doing… something… to ensure more comprehensive reporting of citizens killed by police.

[T]o address the ongoing debate about the appropriate use of force by law enforcement, we plan to collect more data about shootings (fatal and nonfatal) between law enforcement and civilians, and to increase reporting overall. Currently, the UCR program collects the number of justifiable homicides reported by police as well as information about the felonious killing and assault of law enforcement officers. These data are available in Crime in the United States and Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted. As helpful as this information is, however, we need more law enforcement agencies to submit their justifiable homicide data so that we can better understand what is happening across the country. Once we receive this data, we will add a special publication that focuses on law enforcement’s use of force in shooting incidents that will outline facts about what happened, who was involved, the nature of injuries or deaths, and the circumstances behind these incidents. We hope this information will become part of a balanced dialogue in communities and in the media—a dialogue that will help to dispel misperceptions, foster accountability, and promote transparency in how law enforcement personnel relate to the communities they serve.

There’s a lot not to like about this statement.

First off, the FBI is only now getting around to “addressing the debate,” after doing the bare minimum for the past several years. Currently, the data is “collected” via voluntary reports from law enforcement agencies and is limited to justifiable homicides, and then only those where someone was shot during the commission of a felony. This is why the FBI’s yearly totals are, at best, half of what’s tallied by private efforts.

Comey’s statement basically says nothing’s going to change. The collection will still be limited to “justifiable” homicides and will still be voluntary. Comey says he wants more law enforcement agencies to submit data, but there’s no directive being issued to force the issue.

If anything’s going to mobilize a more complete collection of shooting data, it will likely be new legislation. But the only recent effort towards a more comprehensive database of police-involved killings is languishing in Washington, having gone no further than being assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

If any expanded reporting does result from Comey’s announcement, it will still be heavily-skewed in favor of law enforcement agencies and their use of force. Because it will only contain information on homicides deemed to be justified, the report will not provide any further information on unjustified uses of deadly force. This will do nothing to further the conversation on law enforcement use of force, much less increase the level of trust in the communities they serve.

Comey is correct that continuing to serve up incomplete statistics won’t result in positive change. But his statement contains nothing that indicates substantive changes in reporting is on the way. The only difference here is that the FBI is finally acknowledging the public’s growing disgruntlement with the nation’s law enforcement agencies. But Comey’s light touch — designed not to offend his agency’s brothers-in-arms — suggests the only thing he’s willing to throw at the problem is a few extra words.

The Ulbricht Family

by Virgil Vaduva

“We are all at the mercy of tyrants but sometimes beauty shines through all their tyranny and we can find joy in small things” – those were my words forwarded to Ross in prison by his mom Lyn

Lyn Ulbricht is mostly soft spoken, and you would never know about her heartache and passion unless you ask about Ross Ulbricht, her son. Every time I see her she gives me a big hug, smiles brightly and first asks me about the family and the kids. She usually looks tired but determined to continue to get justice for Ross, who was sentenced to life in prison for running The Silk Road. She is a heart-broken mother who’s life has been turned upside down by a failed justice system, manufactured charges, corrupt FBI agents, DEA lies and an out of control judge.

Now information made public within the last 24 hours seems to actually prove virtually everything Lyn has been saying about the investigation into Silk Road, with all the plot twists and turns of a foreign spy film, everything from hackers, blackmail and even kidnapping, torture and perhaps murder.

The original Silk Road developer and architect going by the name of Variety Jones has been in hiding since the Silk Road arrests were made public, but he has suddenly come out of hiding with an incredible story about a corrupt FBI agent who has been attempting to hunt him down and force him to give him access to a bitcoin wallet worth 300,000 bitcoins or roughly about $75 million.

Variety Jones’ real name or identity is ultimately irrelevant. La Moustache has done extensive work on tracking him down and identifying him, and all the signs point to Variety Jones being a Canadian going by the name of Thomas Clark who currently lives in Thailand. He has been active on various online forums for years, especially forums discussing the cultivating of Marijuana.

The lengthy post made by Clark on the forum MyPlanetGanja.com outlines in detail the exploits of what he believes to be an FBI agent (using the monicker Diamond) forcefully attempting to gain access to tens of millions of dollars worth of stolen Silk Road bitcoin. The FBI agent spent the previous couple of years attempting to befriend Clark in order to gain access to Ross Ulbricht’s bitcoin wallet, and ultimately, when Clark turned him down, the agent went mental:

“He went fucking mental, and started going on about his backup plan. He would kidnap Ross Ulbrichts sister, or mother, or ideally both. Get a video capable phone in front of Ross Ulbricht, and he’d give up that fucking pass phrase, and Diamond would have them tortured until he did…”

Personally knowing Lyn Ulbricht and what kind of person she is brings me to feeling quite enraged about these new revelations. It is difficult to imagine what kind of psychopath would take to even think up such a scenario, nonetheless, here it is, the wide open mind of a dangerous, mentally ill man with access to virtually unlimited resources, LEO capabilities, funds and technical infrastructure capable of sustained cyber-terrorism.

Clark’s PGP signature and history of posting activity on MyPlanetGanja confirm his identity. While I guess the story itself could be manufactured, that is a very remote possibility as he has provided copies of signed PGP messages to the FBI.

Clark’s efforts to unmask the real identity of Diamond were not successful. He eventually gave up the hunt and decided to contact Serrin Turner, the Silk Road investigator responsible for the work behind the Silk Road trial and research. This was back in March. Turner has not yet responded, and the signed PGP messages confirm the communication is legit; at least the signed messages check out. VICE also confirms that they verified through back channels that Clark is legit and he is who he claims to be.

After months without reply from the FBI, Clark finally went public with his story, outlining in painful detail the conversations, exchanges and plans the criminal FBI agent had for the Ulbricht family, including torture and perhaps even murder.

Clark made it clear that he is not turning in because he is afraid of the FBI, rather he is turning himself in to protect Lyn and her daughter from what appears to be a well-funded, violent and psychopathic FBI agent who is ready to go to any length in order to gain access to a large stash of bitcoin.

And to make matters even more interesting, earlier today the FBI confirmed they are investigating Clark’s allegations. In a comment made to VICE, an FBI spokesman said,

“We are aware of the allegations made by Variety Jones and have forwarded them to the appropriate office for review. The FBI takes claims of employee misconduct seriously as we are an agency with the mission of upholding the law.”

I’m really not sure how seriously the FBI is taking claims of employee misconduct, especially considering the fact that they were notified about Diamond’s threats of kidnapping and torturing months ago.

And one thing is certain, the idea of kidnapping and torturing a woman, especially someone who is a family friend, is prompting some very strong feelings of anger towards Diamond and the incompetence of the FBI to root out serious corruption in their midst. It’s repulsive and inhuman. Nothing justifies this kind of behavior.

Note: Lyn was unable to comment on this article and on the recent developments related to Variety Jones as her attorneys advised her to avoid public statements.

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak. He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.

An FBI surveillance aircraft flying near Manassas Regional Airport in Virginia

According to flight data, over the weekend an FBI surveillance plane carried out a protracted overflight of the city of Dearborn, Michigan. Some 30% of the city’s population is Arab-American, which has made it a regular target for FBI sting operations.

Despite this, the FBI is loudly denying that the spy plane was conducting surveillance of the Arab-American community in general, insisting they “don’t conduct mass surveillance,” though they did not offer any details on actually what they were surveilling, and maintained there were no threats in the area of the flight, which includes Metro Detroit.

Though some Arab-American groups took that denial at face value, saying there is no reason to doubt the FBI, many aren’t so sure, and indeed the FBI’s overflights of US cities have tended in recent times to be for untoward reasons.

The Justice Department has been conducting such overflights in so-called “dirtbox” planes, which mimic the signals of a cellphone satellite, but being in the air instead of in orbit, are then connected to ordinary Americans’ phones as the closer signal, allowing them to seize cellphone data en masse from the air. The FBI has recently conducted such flights for the Justice Department as well.

If this proves to be the nature of this most recent flight, the FBI could theoretically claim Arab-Americans aren’t being targeted as such. After all, it is everyone who is a target, or at least their cellphones. Still, the FBI’s denial that it conducts mass surveillance as a general rule is demonstrably false, and the overflight is just one more in a troubling trend.

This post written originally by Jason Ditz for AntiWar.com

Not all surveillance tools were lost to the FBI after the expiration of several Patriot Act powers on Sunday.

The national law enforcement agency still operates an air force of low-flying planes that can identify individuals thousands of feet below by the cellphones they carry, and all without a judge’s approval.

The spy planes capture video, and at times, are equipped with cellphone surveillance technology, but none bear the FBI’s insignia, instead are hidden behind names of fictitious companies used as a front for the FBI. The surveillance is captured without a judges approval and used in ongoing investigations, the FBI said.

The spy planes are one tool in the FBI’s arsenal to track down suspected terrorists not included in the Patriot Act debate. On Sunday, lawmakers let the Patriot Act expire, and with it the FBI’s use of roving wiretaps, which allow agents to follow suspects as they switch phones, and the “lone wolf” provision which allowed the agency to spy on non-U.S. persons, even if they had no established connection with a terrorist group.

But the FBI still has its spy planes.

The spy planes are sometimes used to collect evidence and, at other times, to ensure the safety of those police officers who have been sent to disrupt a criminal operation in a remote area, said Jon Adler, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association.

The full story is available here