Khoder bin Hakkin wrote:
http://www.dailyrotten.com/articles/archive/189387.html
December 17, 2001 FBI wants access to worm's pilfered data
Have to reply to this - the outcome of this is great...
Last week the FBI contacted the owner of MonkeyBrains, Rudy Rucker, Jr.,
[I *assume* son of, uh, Rudy Rucker, mathemtician and author. I thoroughly recommend "White Light".]
Accordingly, rather than hand over the entire database to the FBI, MonkeyBrains has decided to open the database to the public. Now everyone (including the FBI) will be able query which accounts have been compromised and search for their hostnames. Password and keylogged data will not be made available, for obvious legal reasons.
[commentary snipped] Flantastic! What possible reason could the FBI have come up with (and I would love to see a copy of the request for MonkeyBrain's database) for obtaining such confidential data, even if/especially when illegally obtained in the first place... The only disheartening side of this is that 99% of the people who *should* be querying that list won't ever hear of it... Ah yes, the media loves to report the gory stuff, yet seems all too ready to ignore the /useful/ bits... Of course, if report mails form the virus were sent to another dozen-and-a-half addresses too, what's the FBI doing about *those* accounts? Did Yahoo et al. just hand over the data as requested? I find it hard to believe that the FBI chased up just one avenue... Furthermore, under the second phase of the UK Data Protection Act [http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/], if the forthcoming Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters [http://www.hcch.net/e/workprog/jdgm.html] were to come into force, would I be allowed to ask the Feds for my account details if I lost them?... .g