Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey, and Supreme Court Justice John Roberts all appear to have violated the trust of the American people with the deeds and words. So why should Americans agree to allow judges to exceed the normal jurisdictional bounds of their venue to issue “anywhere” warrants in regard to computers? How many times has the FBI lied or misrepresented the underlying facts of a search warrant application, using non-existent or coerced or paid confidential information without being accountable for their actions? It is a horrible feeling when you just cannot trust the nation’s premier law enforcement agency and federal prosecutors to do the right thing as they succumb to political pressure. Can we even trust our Members of Congress who have behaved horribly to the American people as they pursued their own self-aggrandizement, self-dealing, and personal agenda?

We all know that there are corrupt activist judges in the federal system, especially in the uber-liberal 9th Circuit (Circus) Court of Appeals. So what is to stop the feds from venue-shopping to pick weak-minded, uninformed, or activist judges that issue sweeping investigational warrants on the basis of a single IP-address?

How bad is this proposed rule change with few safeguards?

With Rule 41, Little-Known Committee Proposes to Grant New Hacking Powers to the Government

The government hacking into phones and seizing computers remotely? It’s not the plot of a dystopian blockbuster summer movie. It’s a proposal from an obscure committee that proposes changes to court procedures—and if we do nothing, it will go into effect in December.

The proposal comes from the advisory committee on criminal rules for the Judicial Conference of the United States. The amendment [PDF] would update Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, creating a sweeping expansion of law enforcement’s ability to engage in hacking and surveillance. The Supreme Court just passed the proposal to Congress, which has until December 1 to disavow the change or it becomes the rule governing every federal court across the country.  This is part of a statutory process through which federal courts may create new procedural rules, after giving public notice and allowing time for comment, under a “rules enabling act.”1

The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure set the ground rules for federal criminal prosecutions. The rules cover everything from correcting clerical errors in a judgment to which holidays a court will be closed on—all the day-to-day procedural details that come with running a judicial system.

The key word here is “procedural.”  By law, the rules and proposals are supposed to be procedural and must not change substantive rights.

But the amendment to Rule 41 isn’t procedural at all. It creates new avenues for government hacking that were never approved by Congress.

The proposal would grant a judge the ability to issue a warrant to remotely access, search, seize, or copy data when “the district where the media or information is located has been concealed through technological means” or when the media are on protected computers that have been “damaged without authorization and are located in five or more districts.” It would grant this authority to any judge in any district where activities related to the crime may have occurred.

To understand all the implications of this rule change, let’s break this into two segments.

The first part of this change would grant authority to practically any judge to issue a search warrant to remotely access, seize, or copy data relevant to a crime when a computer was using privacy-protective tools to safeguard one's location. Many different commonly used tools might fall into this category. For example, people who use Tor, folks running a Tor node, or people using a VPN would certainly be implicated. It might also extend to people who deny access to location data for smartphone apps because they don’t feel like sharing their location with ad networks. It could even include individuals who change the country setting in an online service, like folks who change the country settings of their Twitter profile in order to read uncensored Tweets.

There are countless reasons people may want to use technology to shield their privacy. From journalists communicating with sources to victims of domestic violence seeking information on legal services, people worldwide depend on privacy tools for both safety and security. Millions of people who have nothing in particular to hide may also choose to use privacy tools just because they’re concerned about government surveillance of the Internet, or because they don’t like leaving a data trail around haphazardly.

If this rule change is not stopped, anyone who is using any technological means to safeguard their location privacy could find themselves suddenly in the jurisdiction of a prosecutor-friendly or technically-naïve judge, anywhere in the country.

The second part of the proposal is just as concerning. It would grant authorization to a judge to issue a search warrant for hacking, seizing, or otherwise infiltrating computers that may be part of a botnet. This means victims of malware could find themselves doubly infiltrated: their computers infected with malware and used to contribute to a botnet, and then government agents given free rein to remotely access their computers as part of the investigation. Even with the best of intentions, a government agent could well cause as much or even more harm to a computer through remote access than the malware that originally infected the computer. Malicious actors may even be able to hijack the malware the government uses to infiltrate botnets, because the government often doesn't design its malware securely. Government access to the computers of botnet victims also raises serious privacy concerns, as a wide range of sensitive, unrelated personal data could well be accessed during the investigation. This is a dangerous expansion of powers, and not something to be granted without any public debate on the topic.  Source: With Rule 41, Little-Known Committee Proposes to Grant New Hacking Powers to the Government | Electronic Frontier Foundation

These “procedural” amendments will take effect on December 1 of this year unless Congress passes legislation that would reject, amend or postpone the changes.

Bottom Line …

What could possibly go wrong when a highly-politicized government decides to attack its political enemies, much as we saw in the corruption and misuse of the Internal Revenue Service to affect the fundraising capabilities of right-wing organizations to ensure an Obama election victory? What could go wrong when the Director of the FBI openly lies to the American people, adding non-existent elements of a statute to avoid the criminal violation of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice, and a criminal enterprise? What could possibly go wrong when the Attorney General of the United States openly meets with the husband, himself a potential co-conspirator, of a subject under investigation and then brushes off the meeting as a social affair – yeah right, one held privately on an aircraft surrounded by FBI agents who demanded journalists take no pictures.

The progressive socialist democrats have all but subverted our constitution, the rule of law and civil society means nothing to them, so why the hell would we surrender our constitutional rights to a corrupt and increasingly tyrannical government?

We are so screwed.

-- steve