Was DEA's Fake Claims Of Not Being Able To Intercept iMessages Part Of Evidence Laundering Efforts?

from the questions,-questions dept

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We recently covered the story of how the DEA's "Special Operations Division" (SOD) was getting information from various intelligence agencies -- including the NSA, FBI and CIA -- and was using that to alert DEA, IRS and other government officials of investigations they might want to do, without revealing too many details. Those agencies were then told to "launder" (i.e., manufacture evidence) the information to pretend that they'd discovered any criminal activity through other means. As an example, it was discussed how the SOD might tell DEA agents to look for "a certain kind of truck" at a specific truck stop. The DEA would then get local police to come up with some random traffic law reason to stop the truck, and have that turn into a search. And, then, of course during discovery the defense is never told how the government knew to stop the truck, because they'll claim it was just a "random traffic stop." That's almost certainly unconstitutional.However, I was recently reminded of a story from just a few months before all of these revelations started coming out -- in which a DEA memo was "leaked," in which the DEA complains that Apple's iMessage encryption had "stymied" DEA agents from being able to spy on conversations. Except, as many people noted, this was clearly not true , because the iMessage encryption is not truly end-to-end. Apple holds the key itself, so the DEA can easily get the decrypted messages via Apple. Most of the assumptions were that this bogus memo was leaked either to try to get even more legal justification for requiring back doors in all communications technology, or to try to lull drug runners into believing iMessage was safe when it's clearly not.Of course, now I'm wondering if there's even more to it: given that it's now been confirmed that DEA staff have been told to fake things to cover up where investigations originated, perhaps the letter was part of a laundering effort to hide the fact that some key breaks came from decrypted iMessage conversations that the government had been snooping through...

Filed Under: dea, encryption, imessages, laundering, nsa, sod