The FBI just got its hands on a whole lot of Michael Cohen ’s inscribe communication . In alettersubmitted Friday , the United States Attorney ’s Office revealed that it hold a treasure trove of messages and call logs from a BlackBerry that belong to President Donald Trump ’s personal attorney .
According to theletter , the FBI was able to retrieve 731 page worth of conversations from encrypted messaging services WhatsApp and Signal which it submitted to be reviewed as evidence . The office was also able to construct 16 pages of papers that were chance on in a shredding motorcar when itexecuted a search warrant backin April .
See below – just file in the search guarantee cause . The 2nd and third bullet train could pose a immense problem for Mr. Cohen and ultimately Mr. Trump ( particularly the third bullet)!!BTW , so much for encoding protection!#Bastapic.twitter.com / RwdYjLAEp2
— Michael Avenatti ( @MichaelAvenatti)June 15 , 2018
The Bureau is still attempting to elicit entropy from a 2d BlackBerry take aim during the sweep of Cohen ’s home , office , and hotel room . The US Attorney ’s office staff did n’t provide an estimate as to how much more information may be come from that gadget but did note in the letter to Judge Kimba Wood that it recovered around 315 MB of data from one BlackBerry .
“ The Government was advised that the FBI ’s original electronic extraction of data from telephony did not captivate cognitive content link up to encrypted messaging applications , such as WhatsApp and Signal , ” the alphabetic character posit . “ The FBI has now obtained this fabric . ”
How on the nose the FBI on the spur of the moment get its hands on this information that was previously unaccessible is of interestingness . The government and jurisprudence enforcement has been in anongoing struggle against encoding , especially when it comes to communication — a fight that has evidence most notably in theFBI ’s battle with Apple — and has regularly pursuedmethods to crack encryptionin order to get at protected data .
In this display case , it seems unbelievable that the government would have to use any of its encryption - cracking engineering ( or third - political party contractors who do the dirty work for a exorbitant fee ) . rather , asArs Technica steer out , it ’s more potential that the FBI dumped the message from the earpiece onto a microcomputer and used existing tools to get at the database of communications . WhatsApp did not respond to quest for comment regarding the lawsuit . We will update this story if we hear back .
The information recover from the BlackBerry was handed over to Cohen and his squad of attorneys Friday . He ’ll be given until June 25 to review the material and claim protect condition on any of the message . Those claims will be reviewed by the Special Master assigned to the case .
The FBI ’s a la mode convalescence lend to the already massive pile of data collected from Cohen ’s devices , including two phones and an iPad . A amount of 291,770 items were collected from those gimmick , with 148 decree to be “ Privileged ” or “ Partially Privileged ” and seven considered “ Highly Personal . ” With another BlackBerry still out there , and Cohen reportedlyexpecting to be arrestedany day now , things are n’t looking cracking for Trump ’s personal fixing agent who has n’t really cook much .
[ H / TMichael Avenatti , Ars Technica ]
BlackBerryDonald TrumpEncryptionWhatsApp
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