Slashdot Mirror
FBI Does A Cracker-Jack Job
kade writes: "MSNBC has an article on a story about the FBI hacking the machines of a bunch of Russian crackers in an attempt to get evidence on them due to the the inability or unwillingness of the Russian goverment to assist them in fighting cybercrime." Another reader pointed to coverage on CNN as well.
Hang on there - just because the Russian government isn't able to do something in their own country (and may not even want to, since they didn't invite the FBI to come in and arrest these guys) and the FBI does have the means and the opportunity to do so, doesn't give the FBI the right to do so. That's what being a sovereign nation means - you can maintain your territorial integrity even when it annoys other countries. If other countries violate your territory, you make an incident out of it as a matter of course.
In reality, if you don't defend your territory enough, you end up not being sovereign any more, because there's no world organization that enforces nations' rights against each other. But that's another story.
If another country approached the U.S. for the extradition of a criminal, and the U.S. didn't recognize the crime (say, distributing soft-core pornography to Muslim countries, or sending Nazi memorabilia to France (the horror)) and so didn't hand the U.S. citizen over, and then a foreign power lured said citizen out of the country, entrapped them to get their password, and then used said password to steal information out of U.S. territory, you can bet the U.S. government would have a cow. If they didn't, then it would be open season on U.S. citizens the world over.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Perhaps more interesting was how they lured them into this country with the promise of a job (and toilet paper, bread, etc.), and nabbed them when they got here... Brilliant!
Jethro
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Scully: 411 UR B453 4R3 B310NG 2 U5!
At which point hopefully the smoking man comes in and shoots them both in the back of the head.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I just LOVE this line...
Pardon me for being clueless... but if you don't have jurisdiction there... then you have NO legal right to do that, meaning you BROKE THE LAW. Just because it's another country doesn't whitewash it!
They'll only have to pay $50 + court costs, $75... but if you get a lawyer to do a class action suit, then you can actually hit them up for the whole $2.7 million with ONE court case.
As evil as class action suits are in the eyes of many, they're great for just that sort of thing. $75 is a thorn in the side, but a class action suit is a huge lamb-feces encrusted iron spike.
The Indymedia center in Seattle was raided by the FBI. Not only that but the federal government has required that all phones have a tracking device by 2005 We should not support a government that hacks into the citizens of other countries computers. It is only matter of time before they do it to us. If they haven't already started. Welcome to the corporate police state.
Two very interesting things in the article:
1) "After Ivanov arrived in Seattle, accompanied by Gorshkov, agents posing as Invita officials asked the men to demonstrate their prowess on a computer outfitted with "sniffer" software to record every keystroke. After arresting the duo, they used account numbers and passwords obtained by the program to gain access to data stored in the computers in Russia, Schroeder said."
Ok, so they brought them to the U.S., told them to log into their computers in Russia, sniffed the passwords, and then used the sniffed passwords to log into the Russian machines. This is hacking? Social engineering, maybe...
2) "The agents downloaded the data, but did not view it until they obtained a search warrant from a U.S. federal court, he said."
Now this is interesting. They don't need a search warrant to break into your computer, only to read what's there. Which means that breaking into a computer isn't search and seizure.
Does this mean that if I break into FBI computers, but don't look at anything, that I haven't hacked them?
Very, very interesting precedent...