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The ends always justify the means.
The Associated Press filed a lawsuit (PDF) on Wednesday, demanding the FBI hand over information about its use of fake news stories. The case stems from a 2007 incident regarding a bomb threat at a school. The FBI created a fake news story with an Associated Press byline, then e-mailed it to a suspect to plant malware on his computer.
The AP sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI last year seeking do ents related to the 2014 sting. It also seeks to know how many times the FBI has used such a ruse since 2000. The FBI responded to the AP saying it could take two years or more to gather the information requested. Unsatisfied with the response, the Associated Press has taken the matter to court.
An Electronic Frontier Foundation FOIA request on a different matter revealed the strategy in 2011, but it wasn't made public until last year, when privacy researcher Chris Soghoian saw evidence of the operation in the do ents and tweeted about it. That spurred both the AP and The Seattle Times to complain vocally about the FBI's behaviour.
"The FBI both misappropriated the trusted name of The Associated Press and created a situation where our credibility could have been undermined on a large scale," AP General Counsel Karen Kaiser wrote in a letter to then-AG Eric Holder last year.
FBI Director James Comey defended the action in a New York Times op-ed. "We do use deception at times to catch crooks, but we are acting responsibly and legally," he wrote.
In the op-ed, Comey admitted that not only did the FBI create a fake news story, one of its agents impersonated an AP journalist.
Read more:
http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy...ke-news-story/
The ends always justify the means.
So the FBI can plant malware on your computer without a warrant? WTF?
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