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United States News

Who Paid for a Mysterious Spy Tool? The FBI, an FBI Inquiry Found. (nytimes.com) 41

Posted by msmash from the tough-luck dept.
A New York Times investigation uncovered earlier this year that the US government used spyware made by Israeli hacking firm NSO. Now, after an FBI investigation into who was using the tech, the department uncovered a confusing answer: itself. From a report: The deal for the surveillance tool between the contractor, Riva Networks, and NSO was completed in November 2021. Only days before, the Biden administration had put NSO on a Commerce Department blacklist, which effectively banned U.S. firms from doing business with the company. For years, NSO's spyware had been abused by governments around the world. This particular tool, known as Landmark, allowed government officials to track people in Mexico without their knowledge or consent.

The F.B.I. now says that it used the tool unwittingly and that Riva Networks misled the bureau. Once the agency discovered in late April that Riva had used the spying tool on its behalf, Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, terminated the contract, according to U.S. officials. But many questions remain. Why did the F.B.I. hire this contractor -- which the bureau had previously authorized to purchase a different NSO tool under a cover name -- for sensitive information-gathering operations outside the United States? And why was there apparently so little oversight?
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Who Paid for a Mysterious Spy Tool? The FBI, an FBI Inquiry Found. More

Who Paid for a Mysterious Spy Tool? The FBI, an FBI Inquiry Found.

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  • Duh? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Monday July 31, 2023 @03:47PM (#63729292)
    How else would the FBI run the surveillance state we have today. A majority of government today and their NGO's along with a majority of the media are rotten to the core.
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  • Defund the FBI and make it a felony to give money to foreign governments for the purposes of spying on or facilitating spying on US citizens

  • FBI (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Retired Chemist ( 5039029 ) on Monday July 31, 2023 @03:51PM (#63729304)
    This is written as if the FBI were some monolithic organization that always moves in the same direction, instead of a bureaucracy where the right hand usually does not know what the left hand is doing and sometimes the thumb and fingers aren't talking. There is always someone with a private agenda, who thinks he knows better than the people above him.
    • But the left and right hands are getting handed money from all the same players. And everyone involved on both sides of the financial transaction know each other well.
      • If you think that a bureaucracy actually spends money on what its budget says, you are move trusting than I am. Also, that does not ever consider their black budgets, that are not publicized.
    • Dammit, I was just about to say that the right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing, like a lobotomised weiner dog.
  • Frontline did a documentary about the NSO group and their Pegasus spyware. At the very beginning of the documentary the narrator says "and these tools cannot work in the united states". There is no technological reason that could possibly be true, but they said it. At that point it was clear that the US wasn't just using the tool, they were protecting and defending it.

    Personally I think apple and google are at fault. The first few years of their phones being hacked, it wasn't their fault. Their security ha

  • Feds being Feds. What amazes me are the number of people who think they are the good guys at this point with all the examples to the contrary.

  • Since Trump, A LOT of people have forgotten that the FBI has an absolutely sordid history of doing stuff like this. One hand breaking the law and the other hand going all Shocked Pikachu pretending "the Bureau would NEVER tolerate this." Even Trump experienced that**, but that's ok because the Orangeman Bad thing.

    I mean FFS, you have prominent figures going all the way back to Truman saying stuff about the FBI's conduct ~25 years after it was founded that sounds eerily like it's present day behavior about 1

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      Yep. The organization is dirty to its core, in part due to the fact that it was more or less started as a secret police mechanism.

      It didn't start with the Pinkertons, but it was made excruciatingly worse when they started joining the FBI.

      It's been downhill since.

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