Saturday 2 April 2016

hacktivist or equities and securities

The US Federal Bureau of Investigations dropped its suit against one global technological giant, served a backhanded measure of victory to the company for having the integrity not to relent in the face of the governments dragnet policies of surveillance, once the agency realised that there was a back-door way, a security flaw to exploit, to access a user’s data, telemetry, call logs and contacts despite (or perhaps in spite of) the company’s refusal to cooperate.
This one subpoena was arguably a matter of national security and public safety but there would be no way of putting this genie back in the bottle once even one exception was made. The company begged-off, in fact, that they were unable to engineer a work-around to the device’s security protocols, but now the FBI has contracted its work out to another company that could apparently bypass the safety measures, but no one is quite sure how. I find it a little incredulous that purely technical means were applied, but it’s hard to say—especially not that the FBI is magnanimously offering its newly-acquired expertise to help local law-enforcement to shoehorn their way into the phones and gadgets of relatively small-fry criminals (or suspected criminals) to keep tabs on their entire networks and supposed syndicates. There’s a legal provision that could be invoked called “equities review” that could force the former plaintiff to disclose what recourse they found that led to them dropping the case, arguing that it’s better for companies to be made aware of an exploitable flaw so they can patch it instead of affording a few then a lot of parties entry, but I suspect it will be hard to compel the FBI to reveal its sources and stooges.