[mtgx]

Exactly. Once they know exactly what someone has done and how, it's relatively easy for them to find alternative means of "suspecting" that person of doing the crime and convince the judge to give them a warrant for exactly what they've already found through the illegal surveillance operation.

I wish judges and defense attorneys would catch on to these tactics more quickly. The rate at which the prosecutors/FBI invent new tricks to fool the courts and defense attorneys so far seems to far outpace the judge and the defense attorneys' understanding of what's even happening.

Take cell site simulators, for instance - the FBI has used those in secret for more than a decade before they were uncovered at all, and then it took another decade for judges here and there to catch-up and start requiring warrants for such operations.

And this goes for a lot of FBI's "investigative techniques", too, which are often illegal, but what judge is really going to know the difference between those highly technical operations?

[frankharv]

All this assumes the judiciary is fair.

I feel otherwise.

When Microsoft was about to be broken up an appellate judge overruled the prior judge. That judge went on to be the FISA secret court judge.

Remember that the NSA Key was discovered around the same time[0].

So Microsoft was in bed with NSA prior to 1999 with a crypto key backdoor.

They were helped by an future FISA judge.(Does that background look like a national security judge?)

When I look at the Judges resume I can help but to wonder if she was an NSA plant the whole time.[1]

The Commerce Department is a frequent cover for the NSA.

I have to assume they use deep cover people all around us.

[0]https://www.heise.de/tp/features/How-NSA-access-was-built-in...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colleen_Kollar-Kotelly

[Latteland]

I am skeptical of source #0. I thought that idea of nsa keys had been debunked. At least that source is not complete. Someone found a string 'nsakey' and they talk about analyzing the 'entropy of the source code'. What does that actually mean in technical terms that make sense to software engineers? I'm too stupid to understand that I guess. Sure, it would make sense for the nsa to try to do this. But it wouldn't make as much sense for microsoft to do it. Linux is out there now. I used to work at microsoft, and our product had a secured special bug database where we recorded security issues. We didn't want random people in the company to know that you could make your login name do string injection was an example of something we had there.

[walterbell]

> I wish judges and defense attorneys would catch on to these tactics more quickly.

Is there a tech-law publication which targets judges and defense attorneys?