14 DAY TRIAL // The FBI failed to break the encryption protecting the data of a high profile banker investigated in the largest corruption and money laundering case in Brazilian history. The Bureau's experts gave up twelve months after receiving the seized equipment from the Brazilian authorities.
In July 2008, the Brazilian Federal police raided the Rio home of Daniel Valente Dantas, a Brazilian banker and investor, as part of Operation Satiagraha, a large investigation into high profile financial crimes that involved misuse of public funds. The authorities seized several hard drives as evidence; however, they soon discovered that data on them was all encrypted.
After experts from the Brazilian National Institute of Criminology (INC) unsuccessfully tried to recover the data for five months, the Brazilian authorities decided to ask the help from an institution with more expertise in handling such problems – the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. Brazilian media outfit Globo reports that the drives were set to USA in early 2009 where the FBI tried to crack the encryption for the following twelve months.
The data is said to be protected with TrueCrypt, a freely available encryption program, using a 256-bit AES cipher, which is still considered cryptographically sound. Both the INC and the FBI tried similar brute-force dictionary-based approaches at cracking the encryption before giving up. The hard drives were returned to Brazil in April of this year.
It seems that the hands of the Brazilian authorities are tied, as far as inspecting the information contained on the seized equipment is concerned. This is because, unlike in other countries, such as the United Kingdom, there are no legal means of forcing the owner to divulge the password he used to protect the data. For now, the drives will remain in police custody in hopes that future technological breakthroughs could allow their decryption.
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