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Hacked documents reveal sensitive details of expanding border surveillance
Far more information was taken in the hack of a Customs and Border Protection contractor than U.S. officials have acknowledged
The recent cyberattack on a U.S. Customs and Border Protection subcontractor didn’t expose just the faces and license plates of thousands of U.S. travelers. It also revealed the inner workings of a complex surveillance network that border authorities have long sought to keep secret.
CBP officials have downplayed the significance of the material taken in the hack, saying only that fewer than 100,000 photos of travelers had been compromised and that none of those had been posted to the “dark Web,” the corner of the Internet where stolen documents are often traded and displayed.
That assessment, however, woefully understates the number of sensitive documents that are now freely available on the Web — so much material, totaling hundreds of gigabytes, that The Washington Post required several days of computer time to capture it all.
The documents offer an unusually intimate glimpse of the machinery that U.S. officials depend on for the constant monitoring of legal immigration through the border. They also illuminate the government’s plans for expanding its use of license plate readers and facial-recognition cameras, including such details as how many cameras are focused on which traffic lanes at some of the busiest border crossings in the world.
The hoard of hacked documents includes detailed schematics, confidential agreements, equipment lists, budget spreadsheets, internal photos and hardware blueprints for security systems.
Among potentially sensitive government material are internal Department of Homeland Security handbooks, border surveillance diagrams and dozens of signed nondisclosure agreements between the subcontractor and government authorities, as well as companies such as Microsoft and the defense-contracting giant Northrop Grumman. Microsoft and Northrop Grumman did not respond to requests for comment.
The files also offer extensive detail on — and, in some cases, a literal road map to — equipment that has been installed at U.S. military bases and the United States’ most highly trafficked border gateways.
“This is red meat for their competitors . . . [and] a whole set of domestic and foreign terrorists and criminals who might want to use that information,” said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington think tank.
“This is a pretty stark view into one of the cogs of the U.S. surveillance state,” he said, adding that federal authorities “may have to change some of that operational stuff pretty quickly before people take advantage.”
[U.S. Customs and Border Protection says photos of travelers were taken in a data breach]
Taken as a whole, the documents provide a rare look into the U.S. government’s dependence on a cluster of little-known private contractors to martial its efforts to monitor who enters and leaves the United States.
The firm whose computer systems appear to have been breached, Perceptics, is an obscure presence in the world of federal contracting: a 40-year-old company based in a strip mall in Farragut, Tenn., a Knoxville suburb, that many privacy advocates say they had never heard of until recently. But its technology, the documents show, helps form the core of a security engine that has photographed virtually every car and truck crossing the border over the past decade in a process for which there is little public oversight.
Hackers posted the cache of documents onto the dark Web, where files are hidden from search engines and accessible only through special software, such as the Tor browser, that allow for enhanced encryption and user anonymity
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