Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon is pushing the U.S. Government Accountability Office to investigate how federal agencies use hacking tools and spyware against Americans. The request, made in a letter Friday, traces the history of these tools back to a Philadelphia case that put the city at the center of a surveillance milestone.
The earliest documented case of the FBI using spyware dates to 1999, when agents investigating illegal gambling and loan sharking discovered that mobster Nicodemo S. Scarfo had encrypted a file on his computer using Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP. To crack it, the FBI installed rudimentary malware that recorded Scarfo’s keystrokes, allowing them to decrypt the file.
That case set a precedent. More than two decades later, Wyden argues the public still knows almost nothing about how often or why federal agents deploy these tools. In his letter to the GAO, Wyden wrote that “there exists little public information regarding its scope, frequency, or operational safeguards.”…