ACLU wants the publication of a secret court order requiring Facebook to create a Backdoor surveillance

The American Civil Liberties Union wants to know how and why, exactly, a joint federal-state task force tracking the MS-13 gang has attempted to order the social giant Facebook to create a backdoor in its Messenger application for surveillance purposes, reported Wednesday TechCrunch.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department attempted to force Facebook to secretly recode portions of its Messenger application to allow them to listen to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls, even seeking a contempt order. in court society when she refused to do it. Facebook said compliance was impossible because of end-to-end encryption, and a US California district court judge ruled against the GM. Yet the legal reasoning behind the DOJ's attempt to obtain a contempt order and its dismissal has not been made public.

The ACLU wants to know more and filed a motion to cancel the sealing of documents related to the case, including sealed record sheets, court orders for sealing applications, court decisions related to these applications and "any legal analysis presented in government submissions incorporated, adopted or rejected implicitly or explicitly in such judicial decisions. "

TechCrunch wrote:

Jennifer Granick, ACLU's legal counsel for surveillance and cyber security, said the public "deserves to know why the government thinks it can dismantle measures to protect their privacy rights online."

"The outcome of this dispute between Facebook and the Justice Department could affect the private communications of millions of Americans who use communication services such as Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype and Microsoft Outlook," he said. she said.

It's unclear whether Facebook uses true end-to-end encryption in calls; Previous investigations conducted in 2015 showed that Messenger session keys were shared in transit with the company using a standard protocol called SDES, which allowed the keys to intercept in transit. However, it is also possible that Facebook has additional layers of security preventing this, or has since moved to a more secure implementation. Regardless of whether it is reasonable or technically feasible for the GM to require Facebook to compromise the safety of one of its core products, the company also asserted that it was in the absence of legislation that requires telecoms to allow investigators with a warrant to access VoIP lines. not tightly integrated with ordinary telephone networks.

The victory of Facebook is important here: the authorities in search of this expansion of power have chosen a convenient villain, a street gang that Donald Trump denounced as "animals" do not deserve the full protection of the law. This is reminiscent of a previous battle between the FBI and Apple for encryption on an iPhone belonging to one of the two terrorists involved in the mass shooting of San Bernardino in 2015, which also resulted in a defeat of the authorities . (The FBI was able to access the phone by paying $ 900,000 to a private company that bypassed its security.)

The ACLU wrote in a statement that a decision favorable to the DOJ could potentially weaken the security measures put in place to protect the one billion Facebook users from hackers, and open the door to similar requirements concerning other services. But as TechCrunch notes, without public access to the DOJ ruling, other companies that will inevitably be asked by the authorities to introduce backdoor surveillance tools into their products in the future could can not quote the precedent of Facebook.