When it comes to questionable legal practices, the FBI almost has a storybook written on it. From their part in the PRISM program, monitoring and tracking people from all over the world, the FBI became known for their questionable tactics, made worse so by the revelation that they had hacked computers from all over the world courtesy of a server they had managed to obtain, raising the question of who were the FBI allowed to hack? The answer would appear to be that they can hack anyone anywhere!
After the revelation that they had tracked a user of an illegal site, the FBI have received conflicting agreements from judges about if they were even allowed to do it in the first place. The story goes like this, the FBI managed to track a server being used for spreading illegal content, a server which they then took control of. Instead of shutting it down like they typically do, the FBI decided to take control and track the users.
The FBI were told by several judges that the warrant they had received from a local judge couldn’t cover the US and anyone that accessed their server. A judge, Henry Morgan, has now stated that they may have obtained a warrant, the FBI didn’t need one. Morgan ruled that because it is given out to third parties, peoples IP’s aren’t considered private. This has caused the electronic rights group, Electronic Frontier Foundation, to raise questions about what would happen if this decision was upheld. The end impact would be, according to an attorney for the group Mark Rumold, that the FBI could obtain information by hacking anyone without any warrants, probable cause or suspicion. The idea of this is slightly frightening.
