The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Justice Wednesday after a months-long quest to obtain records regarding the FBI’s alleged use of Best Buy Geek Squad employees to search customer computers without warrants.

The lawsuit comes after a February FOIA request by EFF was denied by the FBI under grounds that the FBI will neither confirm nor deny the existence of records pertaining to an ongoing investigations. EFF also received no comment on a following administrative appeal.

EFF Civil Liberties Director David Greene told CyberScoop that the FBI had not yet commented on the lawsuit, which seeks to examine whether Geek Squad employees have acted on behalf of federal agents when searching customer computers, in which case a warrant is necessary, according to constitutional law.

https://www.cyberscoop.com/eff-sues-doj-information-alleged-fbi-geek-squad-program/

We're finally going to get some honesty on how the NSA spies on innocent Americans' communications.

A federal judge late last week in Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s landmark case against mass surveillance, ordered [PDF] the government to provide to it all relevant evidence necessary to prove or deny that plaintiffs were subject to NSA surveillance via tapping into the Internet backbone. This includes surveillance done pursuant to section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act since 2008, which is up for renewal this year. It also includes surveillance between 2001-8 conducted pursuant to the Presidents Surveillance Program.

In 2016 the Court had ordered that the plaintiffs could seek discovery. After over a year of government stonewalling, the Court has now ordered the government to comply with a narrowed set of discovery requests by August 9, 2017. The discovery is aimed at whether plaintiffs' communications were subject to the mass NSA program tapping into the Internet backbone called Upstream. The court also ordered the government to file as much of its responses as possible on the public court docket.

The Jewel v. NSA case continues to mark the first time the NSA has been ordered to respond to civil discovery about any of its mass surveillance programs. Since the first EFF case against NSA mass surveillance was launched in 2006, the government has abandoned or dramatically reduced three of the four key programs addressed by the lawsuit:

Internet metadata collection,
Mass collection of telephone records collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act which was ended by passage of the USA Freedom Act in 2015,
Full-content “about” searching of information collected from the Internet backbone.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/05/judge-orders-government-provide-evidence-about-internet-backbone-upstream

An FBI search warrant used to hack into thousands of computers around the world was unconstitutional, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told a federal appeals court today in a case about a controversial criminal investigation that resulted in the largest known government hacking campaign in domestic law enforcement history.

The Constitution requires law enforcement officers seeking a search warrant to show specific evidence of a possible crime, and tie that evidence to specific persons and places they want to search. These fundamental rules protect people from invasions of privacy and police fishing expeditions.

But the government violated those rules while investigating “Playpen,” a child pornography website operating as a Tor hidden service. During the investigation, the FBI secretly seized servers running the website and, in a controversial decision, continued to operate it for two weeks rather than shut it down, allowing thousands of images to be downloaded. While running the site, the bureau began to hack its visitors, sending malware that it called a “Network Investigative Technique” (NIT) to visitors’ computers. The malware was then used to identify users of the site. Ultimately, the FBI hacked into 8,000 devices located in 120 countries around the world. All of this hacking was done on the basis of a single warrant. The FBI charged hundreds of suspects who visited the website, several of whom are challenging the validity of the warrant.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/fbi-search-warrant-fueled-massive-government-hacking-was-unconstitutional-eff-tells