In medieval times, attackers would use a bell-shaped metal grenade or "petard" to break enemy defenses. These unreliable devices frequently went off unexpectedly, destroying not only the enemy, but the attacker. As Shakespeare noted, "'tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his owne petar."

That's what I thought of when the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) recently announced their plans to charge an FBI agent with hacking -- a crime that the agent committed while investigating Russian hackers.


In November 2000, Vasily Gorshkov, 26, and Alexei Ivanov, 21, hackers from Chelyabinsk, Russia, broke into various U.S. computers, stole credit card information and tried to extort money from U.S. individuals and companies. FBI agents responded by inviting the Russian pair to interview with fictitious Seattle company "Invita" and demonstrate their prowess at hacking.

So far so good. But when the hackers remotely logged on to their computers in Russia from the "Invita" offices, the FBI secretly sniffed their passwords. Then FBI agents used the stolen passwords to log into the Russians' computer themselves, and download their files. Armed with a subsequent warrant, they read the purloined documents and arrested the pair based on the contents.

For this, they were awarded the FBI's Director's award for excellence as the first to "utilize the technique of extra-territorial seizure" which has now been incorporated into attorney general John Ashcroft's official guidelines for law enforcement personnel.

At Goshkov's trial, a U.S. court held that the "sniffing" of the user name and password was appropriate because the hackers had no "expectation of privacy" in the "Invita" computer system and that no warrant was required prior to downloading the files from the Russian computer "because they are the property of a non-resident and located outside the United States" and because "the agents had good reason to fear that if they did not copy the data, [the] defendant's co-conspirators would destroy the evidence or make it unavailable."

That was a bad decision, which essentially permits a broad and unwarranted intrusion into anyone's privacy.

Imagine logging into an ISP account through your corporate or university network, or using a web-based e-mail service while at work or school. The court's ruling would permit the employer to "sniff" your e-mail or Internet passwords (or, for that matter, banking or medical record passwords), and later use that data to read your files, because you had no "expectation of privacy" when entering the passwords.

Common sense tells us that the fact that the hackers used an FBI-provided computer to log into their Russian computer does not translate into permission to steal and later utilize their passwords to break in. A diminished expectation of privacy while using a networked computer should not translate into a relinquishment of privacy on anything that can later be derived from the stolen data.

Full Article: The Register -->