"Bad guys are encrypting their stuff now, so we need a methodology of hacking on that to try to break passwords," said Claude E. Davenport, a senior special agent at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center, known as C3. "The Playstation 3 - its processing component - is perfect for large-scale library attacks."

This story is very light on technical details but I don't think I have ever heard the news media describe a federal government encryption cracking technology before, so its interesting in that respect. The story emphasizes the fourth amendment and the use of warrants to seize computer systems, but of course its quite likely that this same infrastructure is used in some cases where computer systems are seized at border crossings without a warrant or any reasonable suspicion. Understanding what sort of forensic analysis is used when computers are seized without suspicion helps us ascertain the privacy impact of those seizures. This is a relevant datapoint.

Federal officers use video game console to catch child pornographers