this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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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.