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The Trap Set By the FBI For Half Life 2 Hacker
eldavojohn writes "You might remember the tiny news that Half Life 2 source code was leaked in 2003 ... it is the 6th most visited Slashdot story with over one kilocomment. Well, did anything happen to the source of the leak, the German hacker Axel 'Ago' Gembe? Wired is reporting he was offered a job interview so that Valve could get him into the US and bag him for charges. It's not the first time the FBI tried this trick: 'The same Seattle FBI office had successfully used an identical gambit in 2001, when they created a fake startup company called Invita, and lured two known Russian hackers to the US for a job interview, where they were arrested.'"
From wikipedia: "Entrapment is the act of a law enforcement agent in inducing a person to commit an offence which the person would not have, or was unlikely to have, otherwise committed."
This is not a case of entrapment because the person was not induced to commit an offense. He was induced to come to the country after the offense was committed.
A good example of entrapment would be if the FBI tricked him in to coming in the country and then arrested him for coming in to the country illegally (invalid visa or some such).
If the perp is stupid enough to travel to a country where he's wanted, that's evolution in action.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The damage has already been done? Huh? You are aware that in most cases arrests occur after the commission of a crime, right?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Haha, you're funny. On the whole, drug users do commit more crimes than non-drug users. I'll give you that. On the other hand, poor people commit more crimes than rich people. Young people commit more crimes than old people. Punish the crime and treat the addict. Don't ignore illegal drug trafficking, regulate it. Drug use and sale in and of itself should not be a crime.
Yeah, as a taxpayer, I'm really upset too when the police waste money trying to arrest a murderer after the event. I mean, the victim's already dead, so they're wasting money trying to protect him. If someone releases a book about the murder, then follow the money. Otherwise, big deal.
In case the previous paragraph didn't drip enough sarcasm in your direction, let's try this another way. It's the job of the police to investigate crimes that have occurred and to arrest those that they have reasonable grounds to believe are guilty. In this case, police have reasonable grounds to arrest him on suspicion of having committed a crime (some variant of breaking into a computer). What does it matter how much or how little he profited from the crime? That's for the judge to take into account, not the police.
Except it's not fraud, and it's not illegal. What the government did, arresting a foreign criminal who committed a crime in the USA, is perfectly legal. How they got him to enter into the USA, by setting up a fake job interview, is also perfectly legal. I can set up fake job interviews with as many people as I want. So can the feds. It's not against the law.
But what most people seem to be missing is the sheer stupidity of the criminal. If a company I had hacked into, stolen source code from, and embarrassed publicly suddenly invited me to their corporate HQ in a foreign country, I would be a weee bit suspcious.
At the very least advertising a non-existent job should be punishable under "false advertising" laws.
False advertising laws are in place to protect consumers from abuse. Advertising a job interview is not the same as advertising a product. It's perfectly legal for me to invite as many people as I want to my office for an interview -- and no job need exist for me to do that. I can interview them all, get all their resumes, and never follow up with a single one of them. It's not illegal, nor should it be. After all, if it were illegal, why would it be illegal? Have I deprived anyone of life, liberty, or property? I have not. If people came and wasted their time, they did so voluntarily.
You need to get out of this mindset that something "ought to be illegal" just because you don't like it.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
However, I'm sure other tax payers, such as corporations that own source code, would lobby to keep it.
Waitaminute. It's not being a taxpayer that gives someone a stake in the government - it's being a citizen, and having a vote. That means that a lifelong welfare recipient and a survivalist hermit, neither of whom pay a dollar of tax in their lives, have a representative in Washington who is supposed to look out for their interests and listen to their concerns. A corporation, regardless of how much tax it pays, is not supposed to have such representation.
Sorry for jumping on you here, but I think that the way your post is expressed - implying that a corporate taxpayer deserves representation - is a dangerous subversion of democracy.
What I don't understand is why we allowed some asshole RAM and HDD manufacturers to steal our word?
Speaking as someone who grew up learning that "kilo-" means 1000, what I don't understand why we allowed some asshole CS people to steal our prefix?
So by your reasoning, you should be able to be imprisoned by the chinese government if you watch (by chinese government deemed) illegal content on a website that's hosted on a server in China. Even though the content of the website is perfectly legal in the country where you are browsing in? No? Didn't think so... This type of entrapment is a slippery slope.
Nihil in publicum sputa.