FBI Returns Seized Devices to EFF Client

The allied forces did this during the second world war. They could not admit that German encryption had been cracked, so if their only source of knowledge about an event was through breaking of encryption, they would not act on it - even if by doing so, large numbers of civilians would die, because in the long run - far more would be saved by bringing the war to a quicker end.

But another thought that crosses my mind is that future disclosures and research may give him new insight to inspect the equipment and try to understand the extent of potential compromise. I would replace it but then hold onto it forever. Twenty years from now, the parts could be a goldmine for documenting what will surely be a historically significant time in the world of surveillance and privacy.

a LOT MORE

In all honesty, I think a security researcher would be more curious figuring out what they did.

I'm going to say "yes", since it seems that simple accusations of treason are enough to declare, say, a whistle-blower to be a traitor.

In the end, you're effectively a traitor when someone with sufficient power says you are.

Fact: NSA/et al. have a complete catalog of devices they can easily implant in any consumer/corporate/civil/military computing device. There is a veritable market within these spook agencies, as customers of each other, such that reaching for a phone-book sized volume of catalogs is where the implant selection process starts ..

There is also much evidence that our CPU's are designed for intrusion in the first place. This is the scarier scenario: it doesn't matter how secret you think you are, if you didn't make your own CPU, there's a back door.

Now, assuredly there's people out there that support field operations that could study the individual device and then exploit it given X number of days. To go from there to assume that USG can undetectably compromise most, or even a large enough subset of devices, is paranoid. The scale of that problem is much larger.

USG focuses on backdooring crypto for this reason. Much easier to compromise a few algorithms than it is to backdoor every device.

Also, just because they have people that can compromise individual devices in the context of a field operation doesn't mean those people are available for regular law enforcement ops, any more than you could get an NFL coach to head up your son's kiddie league team. The scale of engineering is totally different.

If you're insinuating they do this already, then don't you think that would have been the very first bomb dropped by Snowden? Snowden had access to everything. You don't spin up a department like that overnight, it takes years before the department will work well enough to rely on in different situations.