As predicted, the FBI is revealed to have approached Orlando shooting suspect Omar Mateen in 2013 with informants posing as terrorists in an attempt to “lure” him into participating in a terrorist attack.

The FBI is using a dubious facial recognition system and a database of hundreds of millions more photographs than previously thought to hunt for criminal suspects, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).The massive database houses roughly 411 million photos amassed from sources such as driver's licenses, visa applications, biometrics data, and passport applications, as well as surveillance camera footage, the GAO found in its report.

Since 2011 the FBI has used facial recognition software to identify people during criminal investigations. The agency combs through a database of over 411 million photos, including everything from mugshots to driver’s licenses. Today, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report that’s critical of the technology.

The Obama administration is seeking to amend surveillance law to give the FBI explicit authority to access a person’s Internet browser history and other electronic data without a warrant in terrorism and spy cases. The administration made a similar effort six years ago but dropped it after concerns were raised by privacy advocates and the tech industry. FBI Director James B. Comey has characterized the legislation as a fix to “a typo” in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which he says has led some tech firms to refuse to provide data that Congress intended them to provide.

A debate is brewing inside the Beltway and beyond, pitting some current and retired FBI agents against one another in a fight over the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover and whether the name of the Bureau’s first and most controversial director should grace the FBI’s proposed new $1.8 billion...

FBI officials are warning private industry partners to be on the lookout for highly stealthy keystroke loggers that surreptitiously sniff passwords and other input typed into wireless keyboards. The FBI's Private Industry Notification is dated April 29, more than 15 months after whitehat hacker Samy Kamkar released a KeySweeper, a proof-of-concept attack platform that covertly logged and decrypted keystrokes from many Microsoft-branded wireless keyboards and transmitted the data over cellular networks. To lower the chances that the sniffing device might be discovered by a target...

Two US senators have warned that a new bill would vastly expand the FBI’s warrantless access to Americans’ online records. Although the text of the 2017 intelligence authorization bill is not yet available to the public, two members of the Senate intelligence committee have said the bill could expand the remit of a nonjudicial subpoena called a National Security Letter (NSLs) to acquire Americans’ email records, chat or messaging accounts, account login records, browser histories and social-media service usage.

The FBI has been in the hacking business for a long time, famously using malware to log suspects' keystrokes as early as the 1990s. But in the high-profile case surrounding a dark web child abuse site called Playpen, the Bureau is arguing that because it was authorized by a warrant, its computer intrusion code shouldn't be called “malware” at all.

In 2010 the FBI planned to raid Scientology's headquarters. Drone aircraft had gathered hi-res images of the site and the tail numbers of Tom Cruise’s airplane were on file in case David Miscavige tried to flee. The raid never occurred due to an alleged halt from the upper ranks of Washington.

When Jameel Harrison, a suspected drug dealer, attempted to escape from F.B.I agents trying to arrest him near a Baltimore shopping center two years ago, agents opened fire. Two bullets hit his Infiniti FX37’s left front tire. Six bullets struck him in the head and neck, killing him. After investigating the case, a state prosecutor and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division declined to prosecute the agents. That left the F.B.I.’s...

FBI Director James Comey suggested Thursday that the bureau paid more than $1 million to access an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino attackers, the first time the agency has offered a possible price tag in the high-profile case. While speaking at a security forum in London hosted by the Aspen Institute, Comey would not offer a precise dollar figure, saying only that it cost “a lot” to get into the phone. He said the cost of the tool was “more than I will...

For the first time, a judge has thrown out evidence obtained via a piece of FBI malware. The move comes from a cased affected by the FBI's seizure of a dark web child pornography site in February 2015, and the subsequent deployment of a network investigative technique (NIT)—the agency's term for a hacking tool—in order to identify the site's visitors. “Based on the foregoing analysis, the Court concludes that the NIT warrant was issued without jurisdiction...

With multiple redactions and having survived a declassification review, another FISA court opinion has been released to the public. The opinion dates back to November of last year, but was only recently dumped into the public domain by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. While the five-month delay seems a bit long, the alternative is no public release at all.

The Justice Department and Apple spent much of the past few months in a bitter legal battle over whether Apple should help the FBI access data on a phone used by Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters. Now that the FBI's cracked the phone — without Apple's help — one thing is becoming clear: there wasn't much useful information on it.

FBI Director James Comey gave a speech this week about encryption and privacy, repeating his argument that "absolute privacy" hampers law enforcement. But it was an offhand remark during the Q&A session at Kenyon College that caught the attention of privacy activists: The thought of the FBI chief taping over his webcam is an arresting one for many. His comment Wednesday (which is around the 1:34:45 mark in this video) was in...

A startling find by BuzzFeed

The feds warned that “a group of malicious cyber actors,” whom security experts believe to be the government-sponsored hacking group known as APT6, “have compromised and stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks” since at least 2011, according to an FBI alert obtained by Motherboard.

Last week, the F.B.I. successfully broke into an iPhone belonging to one of the terrorists in last year’s San Bernardino shootings, ending the government’s contentious, public legal dispute with Apple. While the agency won’t disclose its method for unlocking the device, it has sent a memo to local law-enforcement agencies, telling them it can provide technical assistance to help solve other cases where encrypted Apple devices could contain evidence. “In mid-March...

A federal appeals court ruled that an FBI whistleblower, who reported fraud and sexual misconduct involving prostitutes, was wrongfully terminated in 2010. By Kevin Gosztola.

We were wondering whether the FBI will agree to use in other cases the same hack that unlocked the San Bernardino iPhone just earlier this week, and it turns out the agency is more than willing to share its newly acquired know-how to help other law enforcement agencies solve their on-going investigations. Just days after it confirmed it didn’t need Apple to access the local files of the iPhone 5c that belonged to one of the San Bernardino shooters, the FBI agreed to...