FBI goes after security expert that FBI uses

Good day all, this is the Angry Systems Administrator. Normally, something dealing with the stupidity of the government would be handled by the Angry Webmaster. However, since the person being harassed by the FBI is a computer security expert, I thought I would run with it.

The story here starts when reports came out regarding vulnerabilities in the in flight entertainment systems on some airliners, along with potential vulnerabilities in military aircraft. Basically, the WIFI system could be used to access the flight controls of modern aircraft and could cause planes to crash. So why the business with the FBI? It seems they dragged a security expert off a plane and basically accused him of being a cyber terrorist since he reported the problems. Here are the details from Fox News:

One of the world’s foremost experts on counter-threat intelligence within the cybersecurity industry, who blew the whistle on vulnerabilities in airplane technology systems in a series of recent Fox News reports, has become the target of an FBI investigation himself.

Chris Roberts of the Colorado-based One World Labs, a security intelligence firm that identifies risks before they’re exploited, said two FBI agents and two uniformed police officers pulled him off a United Airlines Boeing 737-800 commercial flight Wednesday night just after it landed in Syracuse, and spent the next four hours questioning him about cyberhacking of planes.

The incompetence of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is mind blowing. Mr. Roberts is not someone who goes out and commits crimes involving computers and networks, he finds vulnerabilities that criminals could use and tells people about it so they can fix the problem. Then these morons dragged him off for a few hours of “questioning.”

The FBI interrogation came just hours after Fox News published a report on Roberts’ research, in which he said: “We can still take planes out of the sky thanks to the flaws in the in-flight entertainment systems. Quite simply put, we can theorize on how to turn the engines off at 35,000 feet and not have any of those damn flashing lights go off in the cockpit.”

Obviously, some blithering idiots who can’t figure out how to work a telephone saw the report and decided the thing to do was shoot the messenger. And about that report? The government was aware of it and confirmed it.

His findings, along with those of another security expert quoted in the Fox News reports, were backed up a GAO report released Tuesday.

Didn’t the FBI bother to read the report? Apparently not. I suspect they prefer security by obscurity and the best way to have that is to go after the very people you need to find these issues and get them fixed.

“If you don’t have people like me researching and blowing the whistle on system vulnerabilities, we will find out the hard way what those vulnerabilities are when an attack happens,” Roberts said.

He regularly engages with various government agencies on critical security issues of national importance. Ironically, Roberts met with the FBI at the agency’s request three times after the agency asked for his guidance on protecting airplanes from cyberhackers.

To top it all off, the FBI seized all of Mr. Robert’s equipment and demanded he give them full access to his files. Warrant? You are joking, right?

Wednesday night, FBI agents confiscated Roberts’ numerous electronic devices and computer files including his laptop and thumb drives and demanded he give them access to his data. They wanted to forensically image his laptop, but it is a company-owned asset with client information, research and intellectual property, some of which is sensitive in nature and encrypted.

I bet they never considered that a security expert might encrypt his computer.

So after consulting with his CEO, Roberts told the agents they would need a warrant, something they still have not presented.

The FBI has been acting more and more like a Secret Police agency instead of a Federal investigative service. The fact that they intended to rummage through Mr. Robert’s systems without a warrant, in violation of the Supreme Court, tells me that this is an agency that needs to be disbanded. Their paranoia knows no bounds.

FBI agents disclosed to Roberts that they also had questioned fellow passengers and forensically examined the plane to determine if any areas had been tampered with.

What part of “He helps the government find problems before the enemy” didn’t you idiots understand?

Roberts flew from Denver to Chicago to Syracuse at the invitation of a defense contractor to speak an aerospace conference about vulnerabilities in airplane systems, a topic Roberts commented on for Fox News in late March, when he said commercial and even military planes have an Achilles heel that could leave them vulnerable to hackers or terrorists on the ground due to flaws in the entertainment and satellite communications systems.

Now, when I read about how you could access a plane’s flight control systems via the WiFi and entertainment systems, I scratched my head in puzzlement. I would have thought the two systems would be totally isolated and that the flight control computers would be hard coded to avoid any possibility of hacking them. It makes it a pain to do upgrades, since you basically have to replace a circuit board or a chip, but it does make the systems a lot more secure. The fact that they are wide open, both commercial and military concerns me deeply.

The actions of the FBI have shown that they are not competent and might actually be a threat to our computer security systems. They have also been pushing to force back doors into security applications as well as downgrading encryption systems so they can break into them without a warrant.

It doesn’t seem to be sinking into those idiots that if they get what they want, easy access to any system they want at any time, then criminals and terrorists will also be able to break in. What the FBI, and frankly other agencies are doing is similar to posting a “Gun Free Zone” poster. All it does is keep out the people who wouldn’t commit a crime in the first place, and put a great big bullseye on the computers and networks for those who love to rampage through a computer or network they shouldn’t be in.

Thank you for your time.

~The Angry Systems Administrator~

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