Jesse Marx

The Desert Sun

A new rule allowing federal agents in possession of a single search warrant to potentially hack millions of Americans' computers and smartphones took effect Thursday despite the efforts of a group of bipartisan lawmakers to bring the issue to a vote.

U.S. Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-La Quinta) has not taken a position on the rule or a bill, known as the Stopping the Mass Hacking Act, that was written to prevent the rule, but he is, according to his staff, looking into it.

The change in Justice Department procedure comes one year after the San Bernardino massacre and the FBI’s subsequent feud with Apple over access to a killer’s encrypted iPhone — and occurred without congressional debate.

As USA Today reported, the nation’s top prosecutors have argued that the ability to break into electronic devices across jurisdictions is necessary because of the growing use of “botnets,” a malware that allows potential criminals to control multiple devices at once. Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell has written that the rule would be applied in narrow circumstances and "would not permit indiscriminate surveillance of thousands of victim computers."

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Federal agents are supposed to make “reasonable efforts” to inform Americans if their device has been hacked as part of an investigation, but there’s no guarantee you’ll ever know the government has intruded into your electronics.

Fifty organizations, including Google and the ACLU, warned congressional leaders over the summer that the expansion of government hacking capabilities put the privacy of all Americans at risk. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, called the new rule “a largely unregulated law enforcement technique that makes us all less secure.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has promised to bring it up again next year.

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Ruiz has been supportive of the demands of the nation’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the past. After Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the National Security Agency in 2013, the House considered a bill that would have ended the warrantless mass surveillance of Americans, bringing individual cases of suspected terrorism under judicial review. However, that bill, with the help of Ruiz and 216 other representatives, including Juan Vargas (D-Calif.) of San Diego and Imperial counties, was narrowly defeated.

In 2015, a federal appeals court in New York found that the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records was unconstitutional. Six days later, Ruiz voted in favor of the USA Freedom Act, which allowed the NSA to continue looking for links between suspected terrorists, but keeps the data in the hands of phone companies.

This article is part of the Insider column, a weekly roundup of political and public policy news. The full column runs every Sunday in The Desert Sun. Reach the author at jesse.marx@desertsun.com and @marxjesse on Twitter.