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Comment by defroost | Hacker News Reader

For now, but hopefully they don't circumvent the need for such procedures as this, and the growing talk of requests by the Administration for developers to add "back-doors" into all software is really a horrible direction for things to take in the US, if you care about privacy. Orwellian things like this are really upsetting, especially when the government is so blatant about it.

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Well, if they were circumspect, it would be harder to know what's really going on. I'm fine with blatant. :P

I think the article proves that the above-board way (warrant for intrusion, warrant for monitoring, exploiting criminals' stupidity rather than demanding we all be made less secure) works -- demands for back doors and such are just a power grab, one that would come at a very high price.

They don't need back doors if they can just get warrants in this way. Aboveboard, paperwise, and less risk of PR blowback (defunding).

So how do they execute the warrant without either a back door or a working exploit?

They do, but the chit-chat until now has been about low-level hooks exploited for direct investigation, but from the article it appears to use stuff like browser extensions that cause the computer to report. We and the article are all assuming what might be going on, but from the sounds of it even the procedure here doesn't appear to be foolproof, say if a person has their software all up to date or uses lynx or something. One thing that seems for sure is that sniffing at the switch hasn't been enough for them, perhaps because of existing warrant limitations. It also appears that law enforcement is going to continue pushing for more and more abilities under the law than what they ever have at present.

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