"Nearly all" FBI call logs stolen from 2022 AT&T breach; Bureau embraces end-to-end encryption

Privacy
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Despite opposing end-to-end encryption for the past few decades, recent events have caused agencies like the FBI to consider using it. The 2022 AT&T breach mostly leaked communications metadata instead of message content; however, this was enough to expose the contact information of FBI agents and their sources. Leopards definitely ate their face! :leopard:

Anyways, was anyone here impacted by the AT&T breach? This problem may be less harmful society-wise if cross-platform E2EE gets anywhere.

As the US government has scrambled to respond, one recommendation from the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has been for Americans to use end-to-end encrypted platformsā€”like Signal or WhatsAppā€”to communicate. Signal in particular stores almost no metadata about its customers and would not reveal which accounts have communicated with each other if it were breached. The suggestion was sound advice from a privacy perspective, but was very surprising given the US Justice Departmentā€™s historic opposition to the use of end-to-end encryption. If the FBI has been grappling with the possibility that its own informants may have been exposed by a recent telecom breach, though, the about-face makes more sense.

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I still havenā€™t heard about how the NSA feels about all this.

Or did NSA finally recognized the dangers and told FBI to encourage this instead at risk of irony?

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Funny enough, the government tends to argue with themselves over end-to-end encryption.

Law-enforcement adjacent agencies, such as those in the Justice Department, used to oppose E2EE as it often impedes their investigative work. However, the DOD and most intelligence-oriented agencies have long set encryption standards to protect their own secrets (i.e. for counterintelligence purposes). They oppose any form of backdoor that the former may propose enacting.

Of course, this was the historical debate among federal agencies and not necessarily accurate today.

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I seeā€¦ yeah, thereā€™s definitely irony here and is complex to fathom whatā€™s what and why and how.