Image: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/Staff
Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard's podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet.
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Yet, that’s exactly what the FBI did. It found Al-Azhari allegedly visited the site from an IP address associated with Al-Azhari’s grandmother’s house in Riverside, California. The FBI also found what specific pages Al-Azhari visited, including a section on donating Bitcoin; another focused on military operations conducted by ISIS fighters in Iraq, Syria, and Nigeria; and another page that provided links to material from ISIS’s media arm. Without the FBI deploying some form of surveillance technique, or Al-Azhari using another method to visit the site which exposed their IP address, this should not have been possible. Now, in a recent series of filings, Department of Justice lawyers won't say how the agency accessed Al-Azhari's IP address, and are blocking discussion of the issue from entering the public docket.“In discovery, the Government has declined to provide any information related to its TOR operation,” Samuel E. Landes, the defense attorney working on the case, wrote in a filing published Tuesday.The news highlights the Department of Justice's continued and intense secrecy about its use of hacking tools, despite them becoming more popular in a wide range of types of criminal investigations. The knock-on effects of that secrecy can be that defendants do not have access to details of how they were identified, and don’t have an opportunity to effectively challenge its legal basis. In some cases, prosecutors have also lost chances of convictions because keeping the tools secret was deemed more important than winning a case.Do you know anything else about the FBI’s use of NITs? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.
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