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Tag: fbi

  • ‘Terrorgram’ Charges Show US Has Had Tools to Crack Down on Far-Right Terrorism All Along

    ‘Terrorgram’ Charges Show US Has Had Tools to Crack Down on Far-Right Terrorism All Along

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    Allison’s commitment to neo-fascism and white supremacy appears to have run deep—“I won’t quit til I’m dead. my only goal in life is to fucking destroy the enemy,” Allison declared in a Telegram post cited by federal prosecutors. Both he and Humber, according to a government detention motion, sought to identify the informant in Brandon Russell’s criminal case. Allison advocated adding the suspected snitch to “The List” (a collection of federal officials, journalists, businessmen and other perceived enemies circulated by the Terrorgram Collective as potential assassination targets), while Humber allegedly told Russell in a recorded jailhouse call in August 2023 that she had photographs of the suspected informant and was running them through facial recognition software.

    When Allison was arrested last week, feds claim he had a backpack loaded with what appeared to be a “bug-out kit” comprised of zip ties, a gun, duct tape, ammunition, a knife, lockpicking tools, two phones, and a thumb drive. When law enforcement searched his apartment, they turned up an assault rifle, two laptops, an external hard drive, and another “go bag” containing $1,500 in cash, clothes, a passport, ziplock bags full of pills, ammunition, a skull mask balaclava, sim cards, and a birth certificate.

    In a videotaped interview following his arrest, Allison allegedly confessed to his participation in the Terrorgram Collective and “engaging in acts alleged in the General Allegations of the Indictment.”

    Law enforcement consider Humber and Allison threats to their community, and to authorities as well: Humber allegedly worked with Russell to try to identify a suspected government witness in the Atomwaffen Division founder’s current criminal case in Baltimore, according to recorded jailhouse phone calls. Witnesses in Russell’s upcoming trial this November will testify in a closed courtroom to avoid being identified, a highly unusual precaution. In a sealing motion, prosecutors state that not only are additional arrests of Terrogram Collective members likely, but the group’s membership poses a severe danger to law enforcement and cooperating witnesses alike: “Defendants’ many associates, both in the United States and internationally, may seek to harm perceived law enforcement or law enforcement cooperators in retribution for their role in this investigation.”

    Allison is currently detained without bail and is set to appear in federal court in Boise next Wednesday for a detention hearing.

    The volume of evidence laid out against Humber and Allison in both the indictment and detention motion, says Hughes, shows the feds have significantly altered their approach to both far-right terrorism and particularly ‘lone wolf’ accelerationists who have perpetrated massacres ranging from Christchurch in 2019 to Buffalo in 2022.

    “When they go further than they have in the past to lay out the transnational connections and overlay a material support charge, it shows that either the feds are trying to make a point, or they were very concerned about these particular actors,” Hughes says.

    Senior attorneys from DOJ’s Civil Rights and National Security Divisions are listed on the court filings in this matter, another indication that the top ranks of the Biden administration’s Justice Department called the shots on the Terrorgram Collective investigation.

    “To build a case in this fashion is a decision that gets made at Main Justice,” Hughes says. “Someone high up decided to sign off on this.”

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  • He Was an FBI Informant—and Inspired a Generation of Violent Extremists

    He Was an FBI Informant—and Inspired a Generation of Violent Extremists

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    Listing the Atomwaffen Division and the Order of Nine Angles as a lasting influence, Butcher also disclosed the nature of MKU’s “alliance” with 764, which was forged by the users “Xor” and “Kush” (both of whom are still unidentified). While deriding 764 for not committing enough in-person violence, Butcher said the two groups “might still stay associates because they keep cleansing their own way by making the weak suicide.”

    According to victims of 764 members, “Tobbz,” a troubled young German convicted of killing an elderly woman and stabbing a man in 2022, was in the original 764 Discord server along with Almeida and Bradley Cadenhead, 764’s teenage founder who is serving decades in a Texas prison for CSAM offenses. Tobbz also had a Tempel ov Blood trident tattoo and had joined MKU, according to reporting from Der Spiegel and Recorder.

    The second issue of Drums of Tophet, which its authors describe as “designed for the dark warriors of a doom now imminent on the near horizon,” continues in the same vein with features Q309, an occult sadomasochistic, self-described “art project” that borders on CSAM and prominently features Order of Nine Angles themes and a lengthy interview with a founder of the Satanic Front, a southern occultist organization.

    In communications with a former Tempel ov Blood member viewed by WIRED, Sutter openly discussed viewing CSAM with other members of his nexion, and seemed obsessed with conspiracy theories like Project Monarch that involved child abuse. The former ToB member also noted Sutter’s fascination with the case of Belgian serial killer, rapist, and pedophile Marc Dutroux. Shortly before taking the Agony’s Point Press X account offline in March of this year, the account posted a photo of an occult altar featuring a blood-smeared photo of Dutroux next to human and animal skeletal remains, as well as a severed doll’s head inked with lightning bolts and a swastika, on top of a flag featuring a Nazi death’s head and the Nazi slogan “Meine ehre ist meine treue” (my honor is my allegiance).

    On several occasions in the past year, the Agony’s Point Press account on X posted videos and photos highlighting 764 and its offshoots, particularly MKU and the group’s growing interest in the Order of Nine Angles. The account also routinely posted about 764 and com, occasionally adopting a faux journalistic tone to launder posts from the CSAM distribution and extortion network. Around Christmas 2023, @agonyspoint posted a graphic of MKU’s hockey goalie mask insignia with a ToB trident emblazoned in its forehead.

    All this took place as the FBI’s investigation into 764 expanded and new arrests, including those of alleged member Kyle Spitze and Richard Densmore, who pleaded guilty in mid-July, were made in the early months of 2024. Moreover, there is an active FBI investigation on MKU that stems directly from its ties to 764, according to a law enforcement source with knowledge of the matter.

    Earlier this year, the Agony’s Point account turned back toward older Martinet Press material, with several threads promoting Bluebird and Iron Gates, two books that Sutter introduced to the Atomwaffen Division as required reading that celebrate child abuse and rape.

    “A Deal With the Devil”

    The FBI has never addressed Sutter’s role in fueling violent far-right ideology. But the blowback from Sutter’s actions over the past decade is a feature, not a bug, of American law enforcement’s use of confidential informants, says Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Harvard Law School who has studied the topic extensively for more than 15 years. “The informant market is run on this tacit, uncomfortable understanding that the cure sometimes might be worse than the disease,” Natapoff tells WIRED. By utilizing people with criminal or extremist histories to infiltrate hard-to-penetrate milieus like gangs, organized crime, or terrorist groups, she explains, the US government rewards such people for continuing to swim in the same waters.

    “Baked into that arrangement is the well-understood, avoidable phenomenon that these individuals are going to commit criminal acts,” Natapoff says. “The FBI has authorized criminal and unauthorized criminal activity by confidential human sources, and the mere fact that those guidelines have those definitions is a recognition about the nature of informants.”

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  • An American Company Enabled a North Korean Scam That Raised Money for WMDs

    An American Company Enabled a North Korean Scam That Raised Money for WMDs

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    For years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been unraveling what it asserts is a scam perpetrated by agents of North Korea, which used fake companies employing real IT workers to funnel money back to the regime’s military.

    An American company played a key role in creating shell companies used as part of the scheme, a WIRED review of public records shows. Elected officials are now contemplating addressing loopholes in business-registration law that the scheme exposed.

    In May, Wyoming secretary of state Chuck Gray revoked the business licenses of three companies linked to the North Korean scam: Culture Box LLC, Next Nets LLC, and Blackish Tech LLC. Gray said his office made the decision after receiving information from the FBI and conducting an investigation.

    “The communist, authoritarian Kim Jong Un regime has no place in Wyoming,” Gray said in a May press release.

    The companies posed as legitimate operations where businesses could hire contract workers to perform IT solutions, complete with fake websites featuring smiling photos of apparent employees. The companies all had one thing in common: Their incorporation documents were filed by a company called Registered Agents Inc., which says its global headquarters is in Sheridan, Wyoming.

    Registered Agents, which provides incorporation services in every US state, takes the practice of business privacy to the extreme, and regularly uses fake personae to file formation documents with state agencies, a WIRED investigation previously found.

    Culture Box LLC, one of the companies that Gray and the FBI linked to North Korea, listed “Riley Park” as the name of a Registered Agents employee on documents submitted to the Wyoming secretary of state. Park, according to several former employees of Registered Agents, is a fake persona that the company regularly used to file incorporation documents.

    In a statement provided to WIRED, Registered Agents wrote, “The Wyoming Secretary of State dissolved the entities and we initiated the 30-day process to resign as their agent in mid-May. Ours and Wyoming’s processes to identify bad actors works. It strikes the best balance of individual privacy and business transparency supported by an entire ecosystem that cares about supporting entrepreneurs while rooting out the small percent of scammers.” The FBI’s St. Louis office, which led the investigation, did not respond to a request for comment.

    The North Korean operation worked like this: Agents of the regime created fake companies purporting to be legitimate firms offering freelance IT services. Workers hired by North Koreans, or North Koreans themselves, would then perform legitimate contractor work, often using assumed identities.

    In some instances, Americans would set up low-cost laptops with remote-access software, allowing North Korean workers to perform freelance IT work while appearing to use American IP addresses. The FBI referred to these Americans as “virtual assistants.”

    The payments for the IT work were eventually funneled back to North Korea—where, the Department of Justice asserts, it was directed to the country’s Ministry of Defense and other agencies involved in WMD work. The scheme was so expansive that any company that hired freelance IT workers “more than likely” hired someone involved in the operation, according to FBI agent Jay Greenberg.

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  • Microsoft’s New Recall AI Tool May Be a ‘Privacy Nightmare’

    Microsoft’s New Recall AI Tool May Be a ‘Privacy Nightmare’

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    Sex, drugs, and … Eventbrite? A WIRED investigation published this week uncovered a network of spammers and scammers pushing the illegal sale of controlled substances like Xanax and oxycodone, escort services, social media accounts, and personal information on the event management platform. Making matters worse, Eventbrite’s recommendation algorithm promoted posts for opioids alongside addiction recovery events. The good news is, the company appears to have removed most of the more than 7,400 illicit posts WIRED uncovered.

    If you drive a Tesla Model 3, make sure to enable your PIN-to-drive feature or your car could be easily stolen within seconds. While the company has added new ultra-wideband radio tech to its keyless system, which can prevent “relay attacks,” researchers at Beijing-based security firm GoGoByte found that Model 3s (as well as other unnamed makes and models of vehicles) are still vulnerable. Relay attacks use inexpensive radios to transmit the signal from someone’s key fob or phone app that can then be used to unlock and start an impacted vehicle. Tesla says its adoption of ultra-wideband radio was not meant to stop relay attacks (even though it technically could), but it’s possible the automaker will add that protection in the future.

    Police busting people for running illicit online markets is nearly as old a tale as the dark web itself. But this week’s takedown offered a new twist. The FBI recently arrested Lin Rui-siang, a 23-year-old accused of operating Incognito Market, which authorities claim facilitated $100 million in sales of narcotics on the dark web. US prosecutors claim Lin then extorted Incognito’s users by threatening to expose them unless they paid up. Curiously, Lin’s professional experience includes teaching police how to catch cybercriminals by tracing cryptocurrency on blockchains. If the US Justice Department is correct about his alleged involvement in Incognito Market, that would make him one of the most unusual cybercriminals we’ve ever encountered.

    Leaks don’t just impact people on the wrong side of the law, of course. An unsecured database recently exposed biometric data of police officers in India, including face scans, fingerprints, and more. The incident reveals the dangers of collecting sensitive biometrics in the first place.

    Finally, the saga of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange inched forward again this week, with a British court ruling that he can appeal his extradition to the US, where he faces 18 charges under the Espionage Act for WikiLeaks’ publication of classified US military information. The judges said that Assange can appeal US prosecutors’ assurances about how his trial would be conducted and on First Amendment grounds. The appeals process will inevitably push back any final decision about his potential extradition for months.

    But that’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

    Following the trend of tech companies in the AI race throwing privacy and caution to the wind, Microsoft unveiled plans this week to launch a tool on its forthcoming Copilot+ PCs called Recall that takes screenshots of its customers’ computers every few seconds. Microsoft says the tool is meant to give people the ability to “find the content you have viewed on your device.” The company also claims to have a range of protections in place and says the images are only stored locally in an encrypted drive, but the response has been roundly negative nonetheless, with some watchdogs reportedly calling it a possible “privacy nightmare.” The company notes that an intruder would need a password and physical access to the device to view any of the screenshots, which should rule out the possibility of anyone with legal concerns ever adopting the system. Ironically, Recall’s description sounds eerily reminiscent of computer monitoring software the FBI has used in the past. Microsoft even acknowledges that the system takes no steps to redact passwords or financial information.

    Federal authorities are reportedly working quietly to establish ties between antiwar demonstrators on US campuses and any foreign groups or individuals overseas, according to journalist Ken Klippenstein, formerly of the Intercept, who says the National Counterterrorism Center is at the center of the effort. Evidence of overseas ties would lend further ammunition to politicians, university officials, and police, who’ve widely claimed “outside agitators” are to blame for the demonstrations—an allegation that’s routinely lobbed at protesters in the United States, often meant to imply that the protesters themselves are dupes. Incidentally, authorities may also overcome constitutional hurdles to surveillance by establishing a foreign target to spy on; someone unprotected by the country’s Fourth Amendment. Republicans in Congress—representatives Mark Green and August Pfluger—have, meanwhile, asked the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to supply congressional committees with records about the government’s surveillance of the protesters, including any efforts to infiltrate them using “online covert employees or confidential human sources.”

    The FBI has nabbed a 42-year-old Wisconsin man for using Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image generative AI software, to manufacture child sexual abuse material. The man was reportedly caught with “thousands of realistic images” of children, some featuring them nude or partially clothed with men. Court records indicate the evidence includes more than 13,000 gen-AI images as well as the prompts he used to create the images. “Using AI to produce sexually explicit depictions of children is illegal, and the Justice Department will not hesitate to hold accountable those who possess, produce, or distribute AI-generated child sexual abuse material,” Nicole Argentieri, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, says in a statement. The arrest is part of Project Safe Childhood, a collaboration between the government and corporations reportedly targeting online offenders.

    Security researchers this week disclosed to TechCrunch that they’d discovered consumer-grade spyware—often known as “stalkerware”—on the computers of “at least three” Wyndham hotels in the United States, potentially exposing travelers’ personal details. The stalkerware, called pcTattletale, can be installed on Android and Windows devices, giving whoever has control of the sneaky app the ability to access data on the targeted machine and monitor users’ activity. The presence of pcTattletale was discovered thanks to a security flaw in the spyware that exposed screenshots of infected machines to the open internet, according to the researchers. Although the researchers found pcTattletale on Wyndham computers, the hotel company says each of its locations are franchises, suggesting that the spyware infection could be limited to just a few locations.

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  • He Trained Crypto Cops to Fight Crypto Crime—and Allegedly Ran a $100M Dark Web Drug Market

    He Trained Crypto Cops to Fight Crypto Crime—and Allegedly Ran a $100M Dark Web Drug Market

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    The message explained that Incognito was now essentially blackmailing its former users: It had stored their messages and transaction records, it said, and added that it would be creating a “whitelist portal” where users could pay a fee—which for some dealers would later be set as high as $20,000 dollars—to remove their data before all the incriminating information was leaked online at the end of this month. “YES THIS IS AN EXTORTION!!!” the message added.

    In retrospect, Ormsby says that the site’s apparent user-friendliness and its security features were perhaps a multiyear con laying the groundwork for its endgame, a kind of user extortion never seen before in dark web drug markets. “Maybe the whole thing was set up to create a false sense of security,” Ormsby says. “The extorting thing is completely new to me. But if you’ve lulled people into a sense of security, I guess it’s easier to extort them.”

    In total, Incognito Market promised to leak more than half a million drug transaction records if buyers and sellers didn’t pay to remove them from the data dump. It’s still not clear whether the market’s administrator—Lin, according to prosecutors, whom they accuse of personally carrying out the extortion campaign—planned to follow through on the threat: He appears to have been arrested before the deadline set for the victims of the Incognito blackmail.

    An Expert in ‘Anti Anti-Money Laundering’

    At the same time the FBI says Lin was laying the groundwork for this double-cross, he also appears to have briefly tried engineering an entirely different scheme. In the summer of 2021, during Incognito Market’s relatively quiet first year, Lin’s alleged alter ego, Pharoah, launched a service called Antinalysis, a website designed to analyze blockchains and let users check—for a fee—whether their cryptocurrency could be connected to criminal transactions.

    In a post to the dark web market forum Dread, Pharoah made clear that Antinalysis was designed not to help anti-money-laundering investigators, but rather those who sought to evade them—presumably including his own dark web market’s users. “Our goals do not lie in aiding the surveillance autocracy of state-sponsored agencies,” Pharoah’s post read. “This service is dedicated to individuals that have the need to possess complete privacy on the blockchain, offering a perspective from the opponent’s point of view in order for the user to comprehend the possibility of his/her funds getting flagged down under autocratic illegal charges.”

    After independent cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs wrote about the Antinalysis service in August of 2021, describing it as an “anti anti-money laundering service for crooks,” Pharoah posted another message complaining that Antinalysis had lost access to its blockchain data source, which Krebs had identified as the anti-money laundering tool AMLBot, and that it would be going offline. “Stay posted and fuck LE,” Pharoah wrote, using the abbreviation LE to mean “law enforcement.” Antinalysis eventually returned, however, and pivoted last year to acting instead as a service for swapping Bitcoin for Monero and vice versa.

    Meanwhile, Lin appears to have maintained his obsession with cryptocurrency tracing and blockchain analysis: His final LinkedIn post last week before his arrest in New York announced that he had become a certified user of Reactor, the crypto tracing tool sold by blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis. “I’m excited to share that I’ve completed Chainalysis’s new qualification: Chainalysis Reactor Certification (CRC)!” Lin wrote in Mandarin. His last X post shows a Chainalysis diagram of money flows between dark web markets and cryptocurrency exchanges.

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  • Top FBI Official Urges Agents to Use Warrantless Wiretaps on US Soil

    Top FBI Official Urges Agents to Use Warrantless Wiretaps on US Soil

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    House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner and ranking member Jim Himes blasted out invitations announcing a “bipartisan celebration” of the 702 program’s continuation last week. The event, which the lawmakers have dubbed FISA Fest, is being held in a reception room in the US Capitol building Wednesday night.

    A House Intelligence Committee spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

    Turner and Himes were instrumental in preserving the FBI’s warrantless access to 702 data. In countless “briefings” since October, the pair urged members of their respective parties to avoid reining in the FBI’s authority too greatly. Instead, the new procedures designed by the bureau itself were touted by both lawmakers as a sufficient bulwark against further abuse.

    Narrowly winning that battle last month, Himes and Turner worked to kill an amendment that would have forced FBI employees to get search warrants before reviewing the communications of Americans swept up by the program. (The amendment, opposed by the Biden White House, failed in a tie vote, 212-212.) Instead, the FBI’s procedures, now part of the 702 statute, require employees to affirmatively “opt in” before accessing the wiretaps. They must also seek permission from an FBI attorney before conducting “batch queries” of the database. And queries for communications of elected officials, reporters, academics, and religious figures are now all deemed “sensitive” and require approval from higher up the chain of command.

    Congress established Section 702 in 2008 to legitimize an existing surveillance program run by the National Security Agency (NSA) without congressional oversight or approval. The program, more narrowly defined at the time, intercepted communications that were at least partly domestic but included a target the government believed was a known terrorist. While bringing the surveillance under its authority, Congress has helped to steadily expand the scope of the surveillance to encompass a new slate of threats, from cybercrime and drug trafficking to arms proliferation.

    While advocates for 702 surveillance often imply that Americans who are wiretapped are communicating with terrorists—a concoction that Turner himself repeatedly lent credence to this year—the allegation is dubious. Officially, it is the US government’s position that it is impossible to know which US citizens are being surveilled or even how many of them there are. The chief aim of the 702 program is to acquire “foreign intelligence information,” a term that encompasses not only terrorism and acts of sabotage but information necessary for the government to conduct its own “foreign affairs.”

    Surveillance critics worry that the array of possible targets extends far beyond what is being characterized in unclassified settings. It is uncontroversial to suggest that the US government—like all governments with the power to spy—finds reasons to spy on foreign allies, businesses, even news publications. So long as the target is foreign, they have no privacy rights.

    The limits of the 702 program remain murky, even to congressional members insisting that it should not be curbed further. The Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Mark Warner, acknowledged to reporters this week that language in Section 702 needs to be “fixed,” even though he voted last month to make the current language law.

    FISA experts had warned for months that new language introduced by the House Intelligence Committee is far too vague in the way it describes the categories of businesses the US government can compel, fearing that the government would obtain the power to force anyone with access to a target’s online communications into snooping on the NSA’s behalf—IT workers and data center staff among them.

    A trade group representing Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft, among some of the world’s other largest technology companies, concurred last month, arguing that the new version of the surveillance program threatens to “dramatically expand the scope of entities and individuals” subject to Section 702 orders.

    “We are working on it,” Warner told The Record on Monday. “I am absolutely committed to getting that fixed,” he said, suggesting the best time to do so would be “in the next intelligence bill.”

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  • The Next US President Will Have Troubling New Surveillance Powers

    The Next US President Will Have Troubling New Surveillance Powers

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    The ability of the United States to intercept and store Americans’ text messages, calls, and emails in pursuit of foreign intelligence was not only extended but enhanced over the weekend in ways likely to remain enigmatic to the public for years to come.

    On Saturday, US president Joe Biden signed a controversial bill extending the life of a warrantless US surveillance program for two years, bringing an end to a months-long fight in Congress over an authority that US intelligence agencies acknowledge has been widely abused in the past.

    At the urging of the agencies and with the help of powerful bipartisan allies on Capitol Hill, the program has also been extended to cover a wide range of new businesses, including US data centers, according to recent analysis by legal experts and civil liberties organizations that were vocally opposed to its passage.

    Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, allows the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), among other agencies, to eavesdrop on calls, texts, and emails traveling through US networks, so long as one side of the communication is foreign.

    Americans caught up in the program face diminished privacy rights.

    While the government requires a foreign target to commence a wiretap, Americans are often party to those intercepted conversations. And although US attorney general Merrick Garland insisted in a statement on Saturday that the updates to the 702 program “ensure the protection of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties,” and that the government never intentionally targets Americans, the government nevertheless reserves the right to store their communications and access them later without probable cause.

    “Section 702 is supposed to be used only for spying on foreigners abroad,” says Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Instead, sadly, it has enabled warrantless access to vast databases of Americans’ private phone calls, text messages, and emails.”

    Under the law, the government can retain communications captured by the 702 program for half a decade or more—indefinitely, so long as the government makes no effort to decrypt them.

    A trade organization representing some of the world’s largest tech companies came out against plans to expand Section 702 in the final hours of the debate, claiming that a new provision authored by House Intelligence Committee members would damage the competitiveness of US technologies, “arguably imperiling the continued global free flow of data between the US and its allies.”

    US intelligence obtains its vast surveillance power through yearly certifications doled out by a secret court. The certifications permit the NSA in particular to force businesses in the US—categorized as “electronic communications service providers,” or ECSPs—to cooperate with the program, collecting data and installing wiretaps on the agency’s behalf.

    Years ago, the government sought to unilaterally expand the definition of ECSP under the law, seeking to compel the cooperation of whole new categories of businesses. That effort was beaten back by the FISA court in 2022, in a ruling that stated only Congress has the “competence and constitutional authority” to rewrite the law.

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  • US Senate to Vote on a Wiretap Bill That Critics Call ‘Stasi-Like’

    US Senate to Vote on a Wiretap Bill That Critics Call ‘Stasi-Like’

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    The United States Senate is poised to vote on legislation this week that, for the next two years at least, could dramatically expand the number of businesses that the US government can force to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant.

    Some of the nation’s top legal experts on a controversial US spy program argue that the legislation, known as the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), would enhance the US government’s spy powers, forcing a variety of new businesses to secretly eavesdrop on Americans’ overseas calls, texts, and email messages.

    Those experts include a handful of attorneys who’ve had the rare opportunity to appear before the US government’s secret surveillance court.

    The Section 702 program, authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was established more than a decade ago to legalize the government’s practice of forcing major telecommunications companies to eavesdrop on overseas calls in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

    On the one hand, the government claims that the program is designed to exclusively target foreign citizens who are physically located abroad; on the other, the government has fiercely defended its ability to access wiretaps of Americans’ emails and phone conversations, often years after the fact and in cases unrelated to the reasons the wiretaps were ordered in the first place.

    The 702 program works by compelling the cooperation of US businesses defined by the government as “electronic communications service providers”—traditionally phone and email providers such as AT&T and Google. Members of the House Intelligence Committee, whose leaders today largely serve as lobbyists for the US intelligence community in Congress, have been working to expand the definition of that term, enabling the government to force new categories of businesses to eavesdrop on the government’s behalf.

    Marc Zwillinger, a private attorney who has twice appeared before the FISA Court of Review, wrote last week that the RISAA legislation expands the definition of “electronic communications service provider” (ECSR) to include data centers and commercial landlords—businesses, he says, that “merely have access to communications equipment in their physical space.” According to Zwillinger, RISAA may also ensnare anyone “with access to such facilities and equipment, including delivery personnel, cleaning contractors, and utilities providers.”

    Zwillinger had earlier criticized the ECSR language this year, leading House lawmakers to amend the text to explicitly exclude certain types of businesses, including hotels.

    Zwillinger noted in response that the need for those exclusions is proof enough that the text is overly broad; an exception that merely serves to prove that the rule exists: “The breadth of the new definition is obvious from the fact that the drafters felt compelled to exclude such ordinary places such as senior centers, hotels, and coffee shops,” he wrote. “But for these specific exceptions, the scope of the new definition would cover them—and scores of businesses that did not receive a specific exemption remain within its purview.”

    This analysis quickly flooded inboxes on Capitol Hill last week, with some Hill staffers and privacy experts quietly dubbing the ECSR language the “Stasi amendment,” a reference to the East German secret police force notorious for infiltrating industry and forcing German citizens to spy on one another.

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  • House Votes to Extend—and Expand—a Major US Spy Program

    House Votes to Extend—and Expand—a Major US Spy Program

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    A controversial US wiretap program days from expiration cleared a major hurdle on its way to being reauthorized.

    After months of delay, false starts, and interventions by lawmakers working to preserve and expand the US intelligence community’s spy powers, the House of Representatives voted on Friday to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for two years.

    Legislation extending the program—controversial for being abused by the government—passed in the House in a 273-147 vote. The Senate has yet to pass its own bill.

    Section 702 permits the US government to wiretap communications between Americans and foreigners overseas. Hundreds of millions of calls, texts, and emails are intercepted by government spies each with the “compelled assistance” of US communications providers.

    The government may strictly target foreigners believed to possess “foreign intelligence information,” but it also eavesdrops on the conversations of an untold number of Americans each year. (The government claims it is impossible to determine how many Americans get swept up by the program.) The government argues that Americans are not themselves being targeted and thus the wiretaps are legal. Nevertheless, their calls, texts, and emails may be stored by the government for years, and can later be accessed by law enforcement without a judge’s permission.

    The House bill also dramatically expands the statutory definition for communication service providers, something FISA experts, including Marc Zwillinger—one of the few people to advise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)—have publicly warned against.

    “Anti-reformers not only are refusing common-sense reforms to FISA, they’re pushing for a major expansion of warrantless spying on Americans,” US senator Ron Wyden tells WIRED. “Their amendment would force your cable guy to be a government spy and assist in monitoring Americans’ communications without a warrant.”

    The FBI’s track record of abusing the program kicked off a rare détente last fall between progressive Democrats and pro-Trump Republicans—both bothered equally by the FBI’s targeting of activists, journalists, and a sitting member of Congress. But in a major victory for the Biden administration, House members voted down an amendment earlier in the day that would’ve imposed new warrant requirements on federal agencies accessing Americans’ 702 data.

    “Many members who tanked this vote have long histories of voting for this specific privacy protection,” says Sean Vitka, policy director at the civil liberties-focused nonprofit Demand Progress, “including former Speaker Pelosi, Representative Lieu, and Representative Neguse.”

    The warrant amendment was passed earlier this year by the House Judiciary Committee, whose long-held jurisdiction over FISA has been challenged by friends of the intelligence community. Analysis by the Brennan Center this week found that 80 percent of the base text of the FISA reauthorization bill had been authored by intelligence committee members.

    “Three million Americans’ data was searched in this database of information,” says representative Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “The FBI wasn’t even following its own rules when they conducted those searches. That’s why we need a warrant.”

    Representative Mike Turner, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, campaigned alongside top spy agency officials for months to defeat the warrant amendment, arguing they’d cost the bureau precious time and impede national security investigations. The communications are legally collected and already in the government’s possession, Turner argued; no further approval should be required to inspect them.

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  • Trump Loyalists Kill Vote on US Wiretap Program

    Trump Loyalists Kill Vote on US Wiretap Program

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    For the third time since December, House Speaker Mike Johnson has failed to wrangle support for reauthorizing a critical US surveillance program, raising questions about the future of a law that compels certain businesses to wiretap foreigners on the government’s behalf.

    Johnson lost 19 Republicans on Tuesday in a procedural vote that traditionally falls along party lines. Republicans control the House of Representatives but only by a razor-thin margin. The failed vote comes just hours after former US president Donald Trump ordered Republicans to “Kill FISA” in a 2 am post on Truth Social, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which the program is authorized.

    The Section 702 surveillance program, which targets foreigners overseas while sweeping up a large amount of US communications as well, is set to sunset on April 19. The program was extended by four months in late December following Johnson’s first failed attempt to hold a vote.

    Congressional sources tell WIRED they have no idea what the next steps will be.

    The program itself will carry on into the next year, regardless of whether Johnson manages to muster up another vote in the next week. Congress does not directly authorize the surveillance. Instead, it allows the US intelligence services to seek “certifications” from a secret surveillance court on a yearly basis.

    The Justice Department applied for new certifications in February. Last week, it announced they’d been approved by the court. The government’s power to issue new directives under the program without Congress’s approval, however, remains in question.

    The certifications, which are required only due to the “incidental” collection of US calls, generally permit the program’s use in cases involving terrorism, cybercrime, and weapons proliferation. US intelligence officials have also touted the program as crucial in combating the flood of fentanyl-related substances entering the US from overseas.

    The program remains controversial due to a laundry list of abuses committed primarily at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which maintains a database that holds a portion of the raw data collected under 702.

    Although the government says it only “targets” foreigners, it has acknowledged collecting a large amount of US communications in the process. (The actual amount, it says, is impossible to calculate.) Nevertheless, it claims that once those communications are in the government’s possession, it is constitutional for federal agents to review those wiretaps without a warrant.

    An unlikely coalition of progressives and conservative lawmakers formed last year in a push to end these warrantless searches, many of the Republicans involved vocal critics of the FBI following its misuse of FISA to target a Trump campaign staffer in 2016. (The 702 program, which is only one part of FISA, was not implicated in that particular controversy.)

    Privacy experts have criticized proposed changes to the Section 702 program championed by members of the House Intelligence Committee, as well as Johnson, who had previously voted in favor of a warrant requirement despite now opposing it.

    “It seems Congressional leadership needs to be reminded that these privacy protections are overwhelmingly popular,” says Sean Vitka, policy director at Demand Progress, a civil liberties–focused nonprofit. “Surveillance reformers remain willing and able to do that.”

    A group of attorneys—among the few to ever present arguments before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—said in a statement on Tuesday that an amendment offered up by the Intel committee risked dramatically increasing the number of US businesses forced to cooperate with the program.

    Declassified filings released by the FISA court last year revealed that the FBI had misused the 702 program more than 278,000 times, including, as reported by The Washington Post, against “crime victims, January 6 riot suspects, people arrested at protests after the policing killing of George Floyd in 2020 and—in one case—19,000 donors to a congressional candidate.”

    James Czerniawaski, a senior policy analyst at Americans for Prosperity, a Washington, DC, think tank pushing for changes to Section 702, says that despite recognizing its value, it remained a “troubled program” in need of “significant and meaningful reforms.”

    “The outcome of today was completely avoidable,” he says, “but it requires the Intelligence Community and its allies to recognize that its days of unaccountable and unconditional spying on Americans are over.”

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