why does an FBI agent have 12 million+ identification numbers for iOS devices?

This is the stated reason for the release - to have people ask why an agent has 12m UDID numbers on his laptop. They released 1m out of the 12m UDIDs so that they can guarantee a statistical sample that can be verified, while preserving a bit of privacy.

Along with the UDIDs were other columns with an assortment of personal data, although there were a lot of holes.

How large would a 12m line long .csv file be?

Not sure how many bytes per entry, but it would be of the order of gigabytes.

It would probably compress well

The 1,000,001 line file is 136MBs uncompressed, so 12M should be around 1.6GB

It might be a gigabyte if there were about 90 characters per line 1 or 2 gigabytes tops? "on the order of gigabytes" is a rather pretentious way of saying that.

The filename refers to NCFTA, which might seem in context to be http://www.ncfta.net — perhaps some bit of intel that's widely-traded in NCFTA circles for various uses? I mean, hey, pretty useful if you're tracking down pretty much anything in which an Apple device is used, right?

Perhaps Apple (or someone) is having them do an investigation:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/04/26/the-fbi-w...

exactly

Also, what's the point of releasing password protected files to public? I mean, they give you the password thus kind of making the whole password thing a moot point.

It proves that the author of the rant is the leaker of the data, not just some guy linking to data someone else posted.

It also causes all the data to be released atomically even if it took a while to upload to all the places.

> It proves that the author of the rant is the leaker of the data, not just some guy linking to data someone else posted.

I don't see what would stop you from stating the password to a file you didn't upload.

because you wouldn't know the password before the public announcement, and after the announcement it doesn't matter.

That's why for these types of archives the password actually contains the credentials.

true, but in this case the password contains "antis3c" [Antisec], the group that is responsible.

So download it, decrypt it, and pick a different password. Takes a couple minutes, tops. And if your 'release' gets more attention than the original, how does the original prove that's what happened, or even get heard?

You can see who came first, the internet knows.

The internet attributes much to the wrong sources. And forgets many redactions. I wouldn't trust such a thing to the internet.

Ah that makes sense. Thanks tlb.

It also allows the file to be widely disseminated and mirrored before revealing what it contains, as an anti-DDOS measure.

Here's another mirror: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?vkyeta7zytgqyhi