The FBI recently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying powerful hacking tools but now the agency claims that it can’t find the documentation associated with those procurements.
There isn’t a whole lot of information available about what the tools are or what they do. Vice previously reported that the bureau’s Child Exploitation Operational Unit (CEOU) bought them for $250,000 from an anti-child predator non-profit. They are described as one of the agency’s network of investigative techniques (NITs), and are said to have the ability to provide “the true internet address” of web users who may be using anonymizing technologies.
404 Media writes that after it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about the tools, the bureau sent back a vague note claiming that additional information about the purchases was “missing.” The FBI’s note read:
“Potentially responsive records were identified during the search…However, we were advised that they were not in their expected locations. An additional search for the missing records also met with unsuccessful results. Since we were unable to review the records, we were unable to determine if they were responsive to your request.”
Could it be that the records are “not in their expected locations” because someone moved them to another location? Gizmodo reached out to the Justice Department for more information.
While its cyber abilities receive notably less attention than those of other intelligence agencies (like, say, the NSA), the FBI has a fairly sophisticated hacking arsenal, the likes of which isn’t without controversy. In 2022, the New York Times reported that the FBI had sought to procure a tool that could hack “any phone in the U.S.” The tool was sold by the NSO Group, the notorious Israeli spyware vendor, whose products have been ensnared in hacking scandals all over the world. In 2023, the New York Times reported that a federal agency had disobeyed the Biden administration, which had issued a rule that barred federal agencies from doing deals with NSO. The FBI was asked to investigate which agency had disobeyed the White House and ultimately found that the agency itself had bought the tool.
Several recent operations helmed by the FBI have demonstrated the agency’s increasingly powerful cyber capabilities. In January, it closed a backdoor to thousands of U.S. computers infected with Chinese malware by taking over the hackers’ command-and-control server. In 2023, the FBI also used one of its NITs to somehow unmask a Tor user who was part of an anti-terrorism case. That same year, the bureau hacked and infiltrated a ransomware gang known as “Hive,” which allowed it to ultimately disrupt the criminal operation. In general, the bureau knows what it’s doing when it comes to cyber, even if it does keep a low profile.
