this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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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.
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.
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.
What are you even talking about? I’ve never heard of such thing as “warrant precedence.” There’s case law precedence, and a ruling on a case can create precedence that impacts the legality of warrants. If anything, they’re actively trying to prevent such legal precedent by not informing their targets, who would have been the best suited to file suit against them.
I’m about as upset about this as I was about the guy who hacked into people’s routers to close known, commonly exploited vulnerabilities. Which is to say, not at all.
Why are you upset about this? Do you think those people were harmed in some way by the FBI’s actions?
Having botnet malware on your computer harms you. It also harms other people - everyone who is impacted by the person controlling the botnet. It means your private files are likely visible to criminals who have no qualms about exploiting them for personal gain.
Removing the malware, therefore, helps you.
This is like walking into a stranger’s house uninvited through their unlocked front door, removing the extension power cord + ethernet cable that their neighbor had plugged into their outlet and peripheral, and then leaving. (Side note - in many jurisdictions, walking into a house uninvited through an unlocked or open door isn’t a crime.)
Nonsense.
Their intent was good. The end result was good. Their means were not excessive, given their goal.
Could they have used this exercise as an excuse to hurt someone? Sure. Did they? Did the tool they were using malfunction and brick a nice old lady's home desktop PC? Did someone get charged with a crime because of evidence collected outside the scope of the warrant of this case? Not as far as we know or have any reason to believe.
That doesn’t mean they didn’t, but you fix that with oversight, not by refusing to allow the government to combat botnets.
And if you’re concerned about the FBI breaking into your computer through the use of one of these vulnerabilities, then secure your computer. It’s irresponsible not to.
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.