FBI responds to false election security videos
As shared on the FBI X account for posterity. Just the beginning of these sort of things.
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FBI seizes Hive ransomware, saves victims millions
"This hidden site has been seized. The Federal Bureau of Investigation seized this site as part of a coordinated law enforcement action taken against Hive Ransomware," a seizure notice displayed on Hive's dark web leak site reads. "This action has been taken in coordination with the United States Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida and the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the Department of Justice with substantial assistance from Europol."
The FBI confirmed Thursday that it had access to Hive's computer network since July 2022, allowing federal agents to capture and offer Hive's decryption keys to victims worldwide. Since its takeover, the FBI has helped more than 300 victims of the Hive ransomware, preventing more than $130 million in ransom payments, said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland during a press conference on Thursday,
According to the government, the FBI also successfully disrupted a Hive ransomware attack on a Louisiana Hospital, saving the victim from a $3 million ransom payment, and another attack targeting a school based in Texas.
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Redditor asks why the FBI took over for the US Marshals in regards to handling national law enforcement
Question on Reddit:
In the early years of the United States, the US Marshals were the Federal law enforcement service. Why was a new agency (FBI) created to take over their role, with the Marshals relegated to mostly court order enforcement and escort, rather than continue using them as the general Federal LEO service?
The answer I link to, by indyobserver, is superb. Replicating the answer below for archiving:
The first part of the answer is simple; that's because the Marshals weren't relegated at all. What you describe was their job from the Early Republic onwards.
Why was that the case? The position was a patronage one, and up until the end of the 19th century one of the more surprising things about most patronage positions was that they were paid on a percentage of revenue obtained. So if you were a postmaster (the most prevalent patronage job available), you'd get a cut of every stamp sold and letter delivered. If you were a lawyer presenting a Civil War disability claim, you'd take home a rather hefty sum every time you filed on someone's behalf. And if you were a US Marshal, you could (and did indeed did) get paid some for arresting and extraditing, but your real money maker was in serving paper.
As such, investigating was something they had neither financial interest in pursuing nor any particular expertise at, and this began becoming a significant problem during the late 1800s given the sheer magnitude of land fraud taking place.
So there is essentially only one Federal agency that has any real investigatory experience during that time period, and that's the Secret Service - except when the Secret Service does so, it is acting without any law providing them the power to do so. For that matter, even the assumed function of protecting the President isn't mandated; for something like a decade Congress essentially allows them to do so with what passes as a wink and a nudge while being aware they need to pass legislation eventually. At least, unlike the investigatory role, they don't specifically prohibit the protection function and use the power of the purse to enforce it.
Why do they prohibit the investigatory role? That's because of one of the genuinely nasty Executive-Legislative fights that take place under Teddy Roosevelt.
So at the time - and indeed pretty much since the adoption of the Homestead Act - there was a massive industry funneling those who had theoretical land rights to consolidators like mine operators who would pay people (often over and over, given lax record keeping requirements - Union veterans were particularly sought after since they didn't have a 5 year waiting requirement to gain title) to grab chunks of land and mineral rights. The two most prominent and applicable to the formation of the Bureau of Investigation were in Oregon and Colorado.
The Oregon scandals were a long series of fraud, with a couple of Congressmen (Binger Hermann most notably) and Senator John Mitchell assisting it over a couple of decades. Mitchell was only one of 12 sitting senators ever to be criminally indicted and even more seriously, only one of 5 convicted; he got six months in prison and died there from an infection after getting a tooth removed, which struck many of his friends in Congress as patently unjust punishment - hence one of the reasons for the nasty political fight.
But the 1907 event in Hesperus, Colorado was far worse. It was the lead Secret Service agent, Joe Walker, who'd gotten something like 1400 indictments from land fraud, along with another agent, Thomas Callaghan, and a couple of government contractors who were working as investigators for the Interior Department, John Chapson and Tom Harper.
They went to a homestead claim to investigate a report that it had actually been made on behalf of the Porter Fuel Company, a large coal miner in the region, hitched their horses in a place ominously referred to by locals as "Dead Man's Gulch", found the shaft and immediately realized that given it was reinforced it was an air shaft rather than a well, left Walker above considering he was significantly older than the 3 others and in no shape to rappel down it, went down, explored a bit to confirm it was a mine, tried to come back up, and discovered it'd been sealed off with railroad ties and dirt.
Harper excavated enough to have part of the roof fall in on him (which had him fall too, when only the logs reinforcing the shaft slowed him enough so that it wasn't fatal - he broke a few ribs), went back up to continue excavating, made a hole big enough to exit and tie off a rope they'd brought down, and the other two exited as well.
A short distance away lay the body of Walker, who'd been blasted in the back at very close range with a shotgun (he had at least 12 bullet holes in his back); his revolver was still holstered. They split up to try to better the odds that one would survive to summon help; Chapson stayed behind with the revolver to guard the body, Harper went to a nearby farmhouse he knew had a telephone, and Callaghan went back to town to get the sheriff.
On the way there, he ran into two men on a buggy, one a miner, the other holding a shotgun and identifying himself Joseph Vanderweide, both the superintendent of Porter Fuel and the owner of the homestead. They told Callaghan they were out with a shotgun on Sunday 'hunting rabbits' (which you don't do with a shotgun if you want to use their meat later); Callaghan arrested them, ran into the sheriff along the way (there'd been an 'anonymous tip' of a shooting), and they were brought to the Durango jail.
Vanderweide eventually confessed, but claimed self defense, which was extraordinarily dubious given the shot in the back and that the revolver was untouched. The trial, conducted in state court with a judge and jury of locals opposed to government restriction on land use (for instance, the judge had reduced the 1400 indictments of the grand jury down to one, murder), was a farce and both men were acquitted. The only value of it was that in the investigation, the full plan was revealed: they were going to drop dynamite down the shaft along with Walker's body and claim a gas pocket had exploded, conveniently eliminating any evidence of the murder of all four.
The case made it all the way up to the Supreme Court when the two were indicted on a separate count of conspiracy to commit murder, but it ruled it was essentially double jeopardy and the two walked away free. Walker is now generally regarded as the first Secret Service agent murdered in the line of duty.
While the lack of punishment led to outrage in the press, on the other hand Congress was not particularly happy that the Secret Service had not only blown past its statutory authority but was investigating multiple members for land fraud. To give you an idea of how upset Congress was, it took the extraordinary step of expunging a message from the President on the subject from its records - the first time that had been done since the Polk administration during the Mexican American War.
With Congress not willing to allow any sort of formal consolidated federal investigative branch, Roosevelt snuck in the Bureau of Investigations with a quiet action that wasn't noticed initially by Congress. Those powers (and the amount of personnel) expanded greatly with World War I, largely by default as there was no other agency - including the Marshal Service - capable of the massive amount of record keeping involved in investigating a significant amount of both aliens and citizens.
Finally, keep in mind that the other problem here was very little criminal law existed for the nascent Bureau to enforce; Congress had enacted almost none of the legislation we take for granted today and what there was dealt mostly with fraud. In fact, the first modern federal criminal law was the Mann Act in 1910; for a couple of decades it was about the only thing on the books that the Bureau could enforce for violent crime that crossed state borders. Up until the 1930s the Bureau's arrest powers were essentially unused for the most part; it left almost all criminal cases to local and state police because there really wasn't all that much to prosecute on a federal level. For that matter, once it finally did, the lawyers and accountants Hoover had hired as agents in the 1920s initially proved a terrible match for the gangland warfare the FBI got thrown into in the 1930s; very few carried firearms up until that point (doing so was urged by FDR's attorney general Homer Cummings rather than Hoover himself), and some had never even fired a weapon before they were tossed into the battles that created the modern image of the agency.
Teddy Roosevelt talks about the Colorado case a little in his autobiography and it's covered a bit in some of the FBI histories, but the best narration of the story and a lot of the context I discuss comes from The Birth of the FBI by Willard Oliver; it's an interesting read. I also recommend Beverly Gage's brand new biography on Hoover released a few days ago, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century; it's likely to be the reference biography on him going forward.
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