FBI Has Tor Mail's Entire Email Database 195
An anonymous reader writes "Tor Mail was an anonymized email service run over Tor. It was operated by a company called Freedom Hosting, which was shut down by the FBI last August. The owner was arrested for 'enabling child porn,' and the Tor Mail servers suddenly began hosting FBI malware that attempted to de-anonymize users. Now, Wired reports on a new court filing which indicates that the FBI was also able to grab Tor Mail's entire email database. 'The filings show the FBI built its case in part by executing a search warrant on a Gmail account used by the counterfeiters, where they found that orders for forged cards were being sent to a TorMail e-mail account: "platplus@tormail.net." Acting on that lead in September, the FBI obtained a search warrant for the TorMail account, and then accessed it from the bureau's own copy of "data and information from the TorMail e-mail server, including the content of TorMail e-mail accounts," according to the complaint (PDF) sworn out by U.S. Postal Inspector Eric Malecki.'"
Re:Wait, WTF? (Score:3, Informative)
Fuck sakes - is CP now the backdoor to the whole US Constitution[...]?)
Yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse
Re:Promises of anonymity are greatly exagerated (Score:5, Informative)
Lavabit was willing to take the sword and went out of business.
Re:Wait, WTF? (Score:5, Informative)
When Slashdot was very young, before we had a mode system, the was an article on "the four horsemen of the internet apocalypse": that our rights online were sure to erode in the name of fighting terrorism, CP, hacking, and/or drug dealing. Wow, that was an amazing prediction - if we include "torrenting ripped media" in hacking, that's been right on target. I hadn't been understanding the "drug dealing" part until the Silk Road bust, but sure enough.
This is why I resist giving the government any special power only to be used in extremes - excuses are so readily available that "extremes" becomes commonplace in a few years. And whatever the real motivation for the various TOR busts, WikiLeaks is effectively dead now as a result, with their TOR service is gone.
You can certainly see the FBI wanting TOR just strong enough to leak information from the Iranian government safely, but not strong enough to leak information about the US government safely. Sad that it seems to have come to that.
Re:Presumed guilty (Score:4, Informative)
Legally, they should delete all of the tormail data since it wan't relevant to their search.
Re:NO, no no! (Score:4, Informative)
"I seriously, seriously doubt soldiers would follow orders that result in the slaughter (and it would be slaughter) of thousands of Americans. "
You mean like in the Civil War?