It’s happened at least three times. They got Yahoo’s CEO to [bypass SOX compliance and] hand over access to 500 million email accounts. Last I heard, she said they convinced her she wasn’t allowed to ask corporate lawyers for guidance.
The Washington Post article is now bullshit-walled, but goes into more details.
One of my favorite parts of the story is that the intelligence agency handlers needed to make sure they only hired incompetent / mediocre engineers and mathematicians at the actual company (algorithm and backdoor design was done at a US government agency that employed competent people).
One day, a brilliant woman applied for a job. She aced the interview, and there were concerns she might be too smart, but upper management hired her on the grounds that the interview results were probably spurious. She was just a woman, after all.
She ended up exposing and fixing their backdoors pretty quickly, which caused a huge containment problem for them.
> Last I heard, she said they convinced her she wasn’t allowed to ask corporate lawyers for guidance.
To me, anyone purporting to be an official government employee advising you that you cannot speak to an attorney throws up so many red flags, that I just can't imagine it being anything but sinister.
If an official government employee is already apparently breaking the law and also threatening you personally, you need to ask yourself whether they'll worry about continuing to break the law in order to make good on their threats.
Note that none of the people that coerced Mayer into breaking the law have been disciplined or even named, so I guess they didn't need to worry about such things after all.
I've heard EFF and corporate lawyers advise people to never speak to law enforcement under any circumstances. The reason is that the police are allowed to lie about their intentions and the facts of the case, and if you say something that is incorrect, you can be prosecuted for lying to them.
So, for example, they can spew a bunch of lies and trick you into incorrectly speculating ("Since Jim was waving that gun at you, then I guess he really did buy it after all"), and then later, you need to prove (probably without the benefit of a recording) that it should have been clear to the officers that it was just speculation, or you go to jail.
Their advice boiled down to politely and repeatedly respond with "I want my lawyer". At least one court has ruled that failing to respond at all to a question (even after repeatedly asking for a lawyer) means that you're now responding (perhaps with body language) and the interrogation is therefore admissible.
It is they will need to make the police not so bad.
Make it illegal for police to lie about their intentions and the facts of the case (although perhaps they should be permitted to hide some of the facts of the case (although they cannot hide what you are actually accused of, or anything like that, if they are actually arresting you (since otherwise they should have no authority to arrest anyone)), and anyone (whether police or not) should always be permitted to claim "I don't know").
If you lie (or make a mistake) to the police while you are being interrogated, that should not be illegal (although making a false police report (while you are not being interrogated) would still be illegal).
Furthermore, any claim they make that, if valid, would not authorize them to do what they are doing to you, makes what they are doing illegal in that instance. For example, if you ask them if they are police and they say they are not police then they have no authority to arrest you (although they can still make a citizen's arrest (for situations where that is permitted, so, not necessarily all of the things that the police might arrest you for), or to call some of the police other than themself (using the methods that ordinary people would use, not the ones reserved for police), etc.
This isn't even half of enough to fix the problems with police, but it is a start.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/04/yahoo-sec...
Both she and Yahoo’s shareholders suffered greatly for complying.
There’s also Crypto AG, which was a foreign-owned CIA front that spied on US allies:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/11/crypto-ag-ci...
The Washington Post article is now bullshit-walled, but goes into more details.
One of my favorite parts of the story is that the intelligence agency handlers needed to make sure they only hired incompetent / mediocre engineers and mathematicians at the actual company (algorithm and backdoor design was done at a US government agency that employed competent people).
One day, a brilliant woman applied for a job. She aced the interview, and there were concerns she might be too smart, but upper management hired her on the grounds that the interview results were probably spurious. She was just a woman, after all.
She ended up exposing and fixing their backdoors pretty quickly, which caused a huge containment problem for them.