Russian Agency Charges FBI Agent With Hacking

eNonymous Coward writes "An FBI agent who helped lure two Russian 'hackers' to the USA in 2000 so that they could be arrested is now being charged with hacking himself by the Russian FSB. You might remember that Gorshkov and Ivanov exploited an NT vulnerability to steal information from corporate networks, which was then used to extort money from the companies; they're also accused of being behind the CDUniverse and Western Union credit card database thefts. Last year a federal judge ruled that the FBI's action was legal, but the FSB disagrees."

Comments

Whose law should apply?

[Cyberdyne]

We've seen this question raised a few times now - from Yahoo! being censored by the French government, to criminal cases like this. My feeling is you should be subject only to the laws of the country you are physically in: for one thing, it's much simpler and more reliable to determine, as well as reducing the inter-jurisdictional mess you could get into otherwise (a host in the UK is broken into from an IP in Canada, so the UK police investigate, then contact the Canadians - who go round and raid the "cracker", only to find it was being used by someone in Mexico as a relay) - rather than extraditing to 10 different countries, you just pass evidence on to the Mexican police, who bust the guy for X counts of computer cracking.

The alternative (the one the Russian FSB [Federal Security Bureau], formerly known as KGB [Committee for State Security]) and certain French censorship judges want is that you are somehow subject to all laws combined - which is a horrible mess. Is this post subject to UK law? (I'm in the UK ATM) Or US? (US server) Or Canadian (accessable from Canada) - in which case it should probably be translated into French as well?

This seems simple to me: when in country X, you are subject to the laws of country X. Everybody else should STFU: I will not accept French, Russian or for that matter Taleban laws as applicable in any way except on their own soil. Hell, if the former KGB considers the FBI's investigation illegal, imagine how illegal the CIA spying on the USSR is - or those spy satellites Boeing and Lockheed make?

Re:Next time gadget...

[mentin]

It was not their [Russian hackers] program that obtained passwords. FBI installed network sniffer and keyboard logger and watched as they logged in to their computers in Russia from FBI computers. After obtaining passwords, FBI hacked computers in Russia to obtain evidence.

What is interesting, is that those hacker had "no expectation of privacy" according to US judge. Does it implies that in US you have no expectation of privacy when using computer at work, public library or internet kiosk?