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In a recurring feature in this newsletter, I publish stories and court documents that you won't have seen anywhere else, ones that provide a mix of strange true crime and real world surveillance. I call it The Wire IRL.

A dark story this week, in which a man in Arizona is accused of stabbing his own grandmother more than 50 times.

From my article in Forbes today: During a police interview, the suspect said repeatedly that he’d snapped and started stabbing his grandmother for no reason, according to a search warrant. The FBI agent asked the interviewee how many times he believed he’d stabbed his grandma, to which he responded “maybe 53.” Another interviewer asked what he’d been feeling during the stabbing, to which he replied, “nothing.” When the suspect was then asked what he was feeling as he was being interviewed, the suspect said, “no remorse.”

With the interviewee providing no clear motivation for his alleged actions, the FBI are carrying out a search on the suspect’s iPhone 11, a device from which the feds have previously harvested data, even when it was locked. At the top of the list of reasons for searching the iPhone is to find any signs of an “intent, plan, or motive to kill or harm any person, his mens rea, or his mental state.” Mens rea is the awareness of wrongdoing in the act of committing a crime; in other words, criminal intent. The mental state of the accused could determine the nature and severity of the charge they face, and penalty they could receive at trial. Arizona judges can impose the death penalty for first-degree murder sentences but the state has suspended executions since 2014.

For me, this case begs the questions: How much can your phone and your data reveal about your mental health? And could the government use that against you?

I'm not publishing the suspect's name in full, but you can read the search warrant in a redacted form for yourself here.

If you have any tips on government surveillance or cybercrime, drop me an email on tbrewster@forbes.com or message me on Signal at +447837496820.

The Big Story

The Stories You Have To Read Today

The SolarWinds hackers managed to break into the email accounts of top DHS officials, including the then-acting secretary Chad Wolf as well as cybersecurity staff at the agency, AP reports.

The official PHP Git repository was hacked and a backdoor installed in the code base, reports Bleeping Computer. PHP is far and away the most popular website backend programming language, so this could have significant ramifications for web security.

A powerful new Android malware was posing as a critical system update from Google, according to TechCrunch. The spyware could take complete control of a victim’s device and marks a new level of sophistication in Android malware, researchers claimed.

Software vendors may have to notify their federal government customers when they're hacked, according to a draft of an executive order from President Biden's office, Reuters reports.

Parler wrote to the House Oversight Committee that it had been handing users' threats of violence against politicians to the U.S. government before, during and after the January 6 riots. Its users, who signed up to Parler for its committment to total free speech, may not be so happy about the social network providing information to the government, even though it's simply obeying the law.

Facebook has taken action against Chinese hackers who used the social network to launch attacks on Uyghur activists. The hackers created personas to try to get targets to install potent Android and iPhone malware on their devices.

Winner Of The Week

Anyone who uses SMS for texts can relax a little about attacks that meant their messages were exposed to anyone willing to pay $16 for a simple hack. That "hack" sees the snooper signing up to a marketing service that forwards SMS messages from whatever number they choose to their own phone. Now, though, major telecoms companies T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon have all updated their systems to prevent that from happening, according to Vice, which had originally highlighted the gaping flaw.

Loser Of The Week

Jeremie Saintvil, a 46-year-old self-styled tech entrepreneur and former Apple store manager, was charged by the Justice Department for a $1.5 million fraud in which he stole the identities of elderly people - including his own mother - to set up front businesses. According to the DOJ, Saintvil used those identities to set up fictional businesses that would then attempt to acquire Paycheck Protection Program loans. Prior to the charges, Saintvil had been trying to get his stock market gamification startup, Verb World, off the ground. No stranger to the courts, Saintvil was once sued for sexual harassment (which he denied) and had sued Apple himself for unpaid overtime. Both claims were settled out of court. He handed himself in to face the latest charges, and remains innocent until proven guilty.