Ashcroft Targets U.S. Cybercrime

[Tim May]

At 4:01 PM -0700 7/21/01, John Young wrote:
>Declan:
>
>>The problem with this analysis is that he does not have to be the
>>main commercial beneficiary for the charges to stick.
>
>But, to repeat, why the worker and not his bosses? Is this a way
>for Adobe/FBI/DoJ to signal the interest of its own bosses?
>
>And why are the protests limited to Adobe when the FBI and
>DoJ are doing the dirty work -- well, actually, low-level FBI
>and DoJ? Oops, that's right, don't fuck with workers-pissed-
>at-their-bosses who have the guns which they'd like to turn
>upstairs.

What follows is mostly speculation, as I obviously don't know any of 
the people involved.

When I first heard about the DefCon bust of the Russian, my first 
question was: "Had there been an arrest warrant issued, or did the 
Feds simply look at the list of who was presenting papers or had been 
identified otherwise (hotel register, nametags) and then try to find 
something to stick them with?"

As for why they busted this Russian in Vegas and not the corporation 
owner who, we now hear, was in Seattle, there are several issues:

1. The above point, that maybe they just looked for someone to bust.

2. High profile. DefCon is a good place to bust an Evil Hacker D00d 
and get a lot of publicity for the already-scheduled "Cybercrime" 
shindig in Silicon Valley a few days later. Lots of press coverage, 
lots of guilt-by-association mileage out of it being the DefCon 
conference.

3. They probably had no idea the Russian company's owner/manager 
happened to be in Seattle. (Just speculation...after all, why would 
the FBI know where a corporate officer was? They guy in Vegas was 
where the action was.)

There's no law against generating an arrest warrant _after_ a suspect 
is seen to be someplace, but it smacks of various unsavory things to 
show up a conference and "run the names" so as to look for things 
they could seek arrest warrants on.

As Declan and others have said, this may be the last time a DefCon is 
held in the U.S. (Not that other countries are necessarily better. 
Attendees in Canada may face arrest by the Mounties for hate crimes, 
for violating the Teale-Homulka censorship, for working for a 
magazine which has broken Canadian laws, etc. And as the Henson case 
showed, the Canadian SWAT ninjas are perfectly willing to do a "take 
down" when their bosses to the south order it.)

--Tim May




-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns