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Reuters reported on Friday that a joint federal-US task force overseeing the MS-13 gang was trying to force Facebook to listen through its Messenger application, even launched an unsuccessful attempt to try to keep it going. contempt of court against the titan of social media. for refusing to do so.
Reuters reported that a federal judge from Fresno, California, had sided with Facebook, although the proceedings are still closed and the reasoning behind the decision remains unclear. However, the news agency added that telecommunications law obliges telephone companies and telephone companies to give authorities access to authorities with a mandate but exempts "many applications based solely on the Internet infrastructure" as Messenger , which works on cellular data connections
Reuters wrote:
Members of a joint federal and state task force investigating the MS-13 international criminal gang tried in August to condemn Facebook in contempt of the court for failing to execute a court order. electronics, Reuters reported last month.
Arguments were heard during an airtight procedure before a US District Court in Fresno, California, several weeks before 16 alleged gang members were charged, but the judge ruled in favor of Facebook, according to the report. same source.
The details of his reasoning were not available … An affidavit from an FBI agent publicly filed in the Fresno Criminal Proceedings indicated that at the time of the arrests, the forces of the The order could not monitor any Messenger call.
According to Reuters, however, the government was able to intercept "all ordinary phone calls and messenger messages between the accused gang members."
Many details about exactly what the government was looking for are not clear. As Verge points out, regular conversations in Messenger, including real-time voice calls, are not protected by end-to-end encryption. This security feature ensures that only devices sending or receiving data can decode them. (One reason is that Facebook scans messages for advertising purposes.) However, there is a secret chat feature that allows end-to-end encryption for messages, photos, videos, and audio files, but not real calls. There had been speculation that this was what the authorities wanted to have access to, although in an affidavit made public on August 30, 2018, an FBI agent wrote that he was seeking access to VoIP calls (Voice over Internet Protocol), referring to real-time. calls.
Reuters previously said that Facebook's position is that it should either rewrite its encryption code to install a backdoor surveillance – which would threaten the security of the entire platform at a time when Facebook is already experiencing many security crises. confidentiality – or [hack] current target of the government, according to … sources. "While some previous decisions have forced telecoms to allow wiretapping of some VoIP systems, these" chat services, games or other Internet services that are not tightly integrated with the existing telephony infrastructure "are generally exempted, Reuters added.
Since Facebook's VoIP calls do not have real end-to-end encryption such as other services like WhatsApp, they would be easier to exploit and therefore more difficult to protect in court. So, it seems like the company has ducked a real ball. As Le Verge wrote last month, researcher Philipp Hancke discovered in 2015 that the session keys used to encrypt calls were shared with Facebook servers during a protocol called SDES, which means that & # 39; They could "decrypt the traffic retroactively".
However, Hancke told Verge that it was possible for Facebook to take steps to "protect this data in addition to the protocol, that is, to refuse to log the keys or to encrypt the data." 39, full handshake. "Facebook may have also updated its security over the past few years.
"They will be able to make a far more plausible denial if they have completely removed the old SDES system," says Hancke. "If they do not have it, they might claim that they do not log encryption material when they pass on their servers."
Reuters wrote the following:
Neither prosecutors nor Facebook were answering questions about the Fresno US attorney's attempt to hold Facebook guilty of contempt of court or on the underlying wiretap application, including on the reasons for the rejection of the file.
The fact that the battle is about MS-13 is remarkable because, just like the legal battles between Apple and the FBI over iPhone encryption following San Bernardino's mass shooting in 2015, the government chose an ideal villain to test the limits their monitoring options. Donald Trump and his administration have denounced the gang as "violent animals," which the Washington Post has dubbed enough pretense to claim "that there is a subset of a massive population that is so depraved." and dangerous that she is an animal requiring a huge and sometimes violent response. "In other words, it seems that the authorities have chosen the least understandable defendants to expand their surveillance envelope in a way that has consequences for countless millions of Facebook users.
More details about what is going to happen should be available in the future, but for the moment, it seems that the federal government has again failed to coerce a company to compromise its security. This is not because Facebook needs help on this: the company revealed this week that a massive security breach could have given tens of millions of accounts to hackers.
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