FBI Claims It Lost Records About Its Mysterious Hacking Abilities

The FBI precocious spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying almighty hacking tools but present the bureau claims that it can’t find the documentation associated with those procurements.

There isn’t a full batch of accusation disposable astir what the tools are oregon what they do. Vice previously reported that the bureau’s Child Exploitation Operational Unit (CEOU) bought them for $250,000 from an anti-child predator non-profit. They are described arsenic 1 of the agency’s web of investigative techniques (NITs), and are said to person the quality to supply “the existent net address” of web users who whitethorn beryllium utilizing anonymizing technologies.

404 Media writes that aft it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) petition astir the tools, the bureau sent backmost a vague enactment claiming that further accusation astir the purchases was “missing.” The FBI’s enactment read:

“Potentially responsive records were identified during the search…However, we were advised that they were not successful their expected locations. An further hunt for the missing records besides met with unsuccessful results. Since we were incapable to reappraisal the records, we were incapable to find if they were responsive to your request.”

Could it beryllium that the records are “not successful their expected locations” due to the fact that idiosyncratic moved them to different location? Gizmodo reached retired to the Justice Department for much information.

While its cyber abilities person notably little attraction than those of different quality agencies (like, say, the NSA), the FBI has a reasonably blase hacking arsenal, the likes of which isn’t without controversy. In 2022, the New York Times reported that the FBI had sought to procure a instrumentality that could hack “any telephone successful the U.S.” The instrumentality was sold by the NSO Group, the notorious Israeli spyware vendor, whose products person been ensnared successful hacking scandals each implicit the world. In 2023, the New York Times reported that a national bureau had disobeyed the Biden administration, which had issued a regularisation that barred national agencies from doing deals with NSO. The FBI was asked to analyse which bureau had disobeyed the White House and yet recovered that the bureau itself had bought the tool.

Several caller operations helmed by the FBI person demonstrated the agency’s progressively almighty cyber capabilities. In January, it closed a backdoor to thousands of U.S. computers infected with Chinese malware by taking implicit the hackers’ command-and-control server. In 2023, the FBI besides utilized 1 of its NITs to someway unmask a Tor user who was portion of an anti-terrorism case. That aforesaid year, the bureau hacked and infiltrated a ransomware pack known arsenic “Hive,” which allowed it to yet disrupt the transgression operation. In general, the bureau knows what it’s doing erstwhile it comes to cyber, adjacent if it does support a debased profile.