The FBI Can’t Find ‘Missing’ Records of Its Hacking Tools

The FBI says it is unable to find records related to its purchase of a series of hacking tools, despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on them and those purchases initially being included in a public U.S. government procurement database before being quietly scrubbed from the internet.

The news highlights the secrecy the FBI maintains around its use of hacking tools. The agency has previously used classified technology in ordinary criminal investigations, pushed back against demands to provide details of hacking operations to defendants, and purchased technology from surveillance vendors. 

“Potentially responsive records were identified during the search,” a response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request I sent about a specific hacking tool contract says. “However, we were advised that they were not in their expected locations. An additional search for the missing records also met with unsuccessful results. Since we were unable to review the records, we were unable to determine if they were responsive to your request.”

In other words, the FBI says it identified related records, then couldn’t actually find them when it went looking.

The FOIA request was for records related to the FBI’s purchase of multiple hacking tools for $250,000 from anti-child abuse charity The Innocent Lives Foundation. This purchase was initially included in a public U.S. government database that lists what agencies are buying. After I reported on that purchase, the listing was removed from the database.

Presumably, if the FBI spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on hacking technology, it might have records about that purchase, even if details have been removed from public view. And especially when the FOIA request provided the unique identifier for that particular contract. 

When I previously reported on the removal of the contract from the U.S. procurement database Scott Amey, general counsel at watchdog group the Project on Government Oversight, said “Transparency of federal spending ensures that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely. While there are timing delays and completeness problems with federal spending data, the public deserves to see what the federal government is buying and for how much, and Congress should be enhancing spending transparency laws so that we have a more complete picture.”

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.