Posted on 08/15/2002 2:49:14 PM PDT by Ivan Ivanov
Russia’s domestic intelligence service has accused an FBI official of an unauthorized incursion into Russian computer networks in an attempt to procure evidence proving the guilt of two Russian hackers charged by the US on over 20 counts of computer-related crime, the Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Thursday.
Russian law enforcers instigated criminal proceedings against FBI agent Michael Schuler accusing him of unsanctioned access to computer-stored information (Article 272, part 2 of the Criminal Code). The case was launched at the initiative of an investigator of the FSB’s regional directorate for Chelyabinsk Region Igor Tkach.
Russian law enforcers moved to launch a criminal investigation into the methods through which their American colleagues obtained evidence of the guilt of two Russian programmers from Chelyabinsk Vassily Gorshkov and Alexei Ivanov.
They are charged with a variety of e-crimes, including theft of thousands of credit cards and other sensitive files from providers, ranging from PayPal, the world's largest online payment company, to the Central National Bank of Waco, Texas.
Last June, in order to unmask the young Russians’ plot the FBI established a bogus computer security firm Invita. They set up an office in downtown Seattle and asked the two to prove their skill by hacking into Invita's network. They succeeded in breaking into the system, and Invita invited Ivanov and his partner Gorshkov to America to discuss employment.
In November Gorshkov and Ivanov flew to Seattle and went directly to a two-hour ''job interview'' with undercover FBI agents who were posing as Invita staff. The Russians were asked to further demonstrate their hacking skills on an IBM Thinkpad provided by the agents. The hackers happily complied and communicated with their home server back in Chelyabinsk, unaware that the laptop they were using was running a ''sniffer'' program that recorded their every keystroke.
In the opinion of Russian law enforcers, to procure the necessary evidence against Gorshkov and Ivanov the FBI agent entered the defendants’ computers. Thus, by applying methods used in espionage, the FSB broke into the Russian server.
At the trial that opened this spring in Seattle Ken Kanev, the Seattle attorney who is defending Gorshkov, filed a motion challenging the use of the seized computer files in the trial, saying that the FBI's use of passwords to access Gorshkov's personal files in Chelyabinsk was like ''picking up a key to a locked container'', and the FBI should have had a search warrant before they downloaded the files. The Russian Federal Security Service did not fail to pick up on this and they pointed out the fact that the FBI is not entitled to carry out operations outside the US.
Consequently, the Chelyabinsk investigator Igor Tkach initiated a criminal investigation and sent an official inquiry to the US Department of Justice. So far, the Russian law enforcers have received no answer from the US.
''If the Russian hackers are convicted on the basis of evidence obtained by the Americans through hackers’ methods, that would mean that the intelligence services of the United States will continue to use illegal ways of gathering information both in Russia and in other countries,'' an FSB spokesman said.
The FSB should be helping the FBI to catch crooks in Russia.
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