I wonder if this is also old hat to you people. If it turns out to be another FAQ, I promise to read some. At a conference in Budapest yesterday (held by Network Associates) I was interpreting for a certain professor Christoph Fischer, from Karlsruhe University. He claimed to be a premier international hacker-hunter and described several fascinating cases, such as industrial espionage performed by the French secret service commissioned by French companies at Boeing and Siemens (the latter resulting in a 6 billion Deutschmark railway contract going to a French company rather than Siemens), as well as a case of extortion in Germany, when someone he referred to as "some crazy person" attempted to blackmail the German government by threatening to fly model aircraft into the turbines of commercial jet aircraft at take-off, which, as it turned out, is indeed a feasible means of causing a major disaster. The professor was called in by a panicky German government, about ready to send off the cash, to try to locate "the crazy person". The extortionist was sending the notes via e-mail, using what the professor referred to as "e-mail anonymiser servers" in the US. "This is not too widely publicised", he went on to say, "but all insiders are aware that all e-mail anonymiser services in the U.S. are operated by the FBI." He went on to say it took them about ten minutes to discover with the help of their American friends which account the mail was originating from. A more serious obstacle was posed by the fact that it was an AOL account and that the subscriber had specified a bogus credit-card number generated by widely available software for generating feasible bogus credit-card numbers, and installed the internet applications from one of those AOL CD-ROMs that were published in very large numbers. They were forced to begin monitoring some 30 thousand phonelines (another very interesting fact: according to the professor, during the so-called "4+2" negotiations just before the Berlin wall came down, the two Germanies agreed to provide the FBI with direct access to the backbone of the German telephone network - consequently all German telephone calls and a high percentage of all European international calls, so they could listen in on those without even making an effort - in fact, he claimed, it is easier for the FBI to listen to German phonecalls than it is for the German authorities themselves), which, in addition to costing a horrendous amount of money, resulted in a bunch of data every day that took them two days to process. So, Fischer said, it would have been hopeless if the fellow had not owed the German tax authority one and a half million Marks - the tax authority busted him (following the lines of their own, independent investigation), took his computer, and he was busted. Quite a few of the messages to cypherpunks seem to come from anonymous remailers in the US. Comments? holist