Software for analyzing fingerprints used by the FBI and more than 18,000 other U.S. law enforcement agencies could contain Russian code, according to The Hill.
Two former employees of a subsidiary of the French firm Safran Group told BuzzFeed News that the company secretly purchased code from the Russian cybersecurity company Papillon Systems, The Hill wrote, adding that the code was then included in fingerprint analysis software the company sold to the FBI when the bureau purchased new software in 2011.
One of the whistleblowers, Philippe Desbois, told BuzzFeed News that officials in the French company were worried about the FBI learning the truth of the code's origin.
"They told me, 'We will have big problems if the FBI is aware about the origin of the algorithm'," said Desbois, the Safran subsidiary's former CEO of Russia operations.
"It was always the intonation like we have done something bad that is a secret between us and that we should not repeat it to anybody," he said.
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The FBI declined to answer questions but issued a statement to BuzzFeed.
"As is typical for all commercial software that we operate, appropriate security reviews were completed prior to operational deployment," the statement said.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration issued a memo banning all software from another Russian company with alleged links to the Kremlin, Kaspersky Labs, from being used on U.S. government computers.
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