FBI Using Social Media, E-Commerce Sites to Track Down Suspects (Including Non-Lawbreakers)

chromas writes:

So Much For Going Dark: FBI Using Social Media, E-Commerce Sites To Track Down Suspects (Including Non-Lawbreakers):

You know the drill, right? The FBI keeps insisting that it has a "going dark" problem due to encryption making it impossible to access key evidence of supposedly criminal behavior, in theory allowing crime to happen without recourse. The problem, though, is that nearly every single bit of this claim is false. It's kind of stunning.

• It appears that, in practice, the FBI almost never runs into encryption.
• In the rare cases where it has (and we don't know how many because since the FBI admitted it over exaggerated how many "locked" devices it had, and then has since refused to provide an updated count), there do appear to be ways to get into those devices anyway.
• But the key issue, by far, is that the opposite of going dark is happening. Thanks to our increasingly electronic lives, the government actually has way more access to information than ever before.

Two recent articles highlight this in practice, with regards to the FBI trying to track down the rare cases of criminal activity happening around some of the protests.

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