Conscience wise, their only absolution I could see is if one of them leaked this information to the Usenet under an assumed name. If I was in this situation, I would do that. Maybe they did. Otherwise, they should have spoken up and risked jail. How can you so deceive people otherwise? Patriotism or the cause has nothing to do with it. If the government wants to hack their criminals, let them find their own security holes. If they want to tap their own wires, let them work this out with their own people. But, if they want to trojanize software secretly, software which has an international userbase... This is illegal outside of their own nation. German police have no jurisdiction in the US, for instance, just as the US police have no jurisdiction in Germany -- apart from whatever agreement Germany has made with the US regarding post-WWII treaties or whatever. Still, I do not think anyone would be pleased if it was found that the NSA backdoored a US product. How much moreso of a problem would this be if local police backdoored a system such as this anonymity system? This kind of crime sends a message to would be hackers. It says that it is okay to hack if the end is justified. Hackers, you may not have jurisdiction in Germany, but if you are hacking pedophiles or Neo-Nazis, they are law breakers, so your means must be okay. Do people really want this? Can anyone really be trusted with this? Wouldn't they hit the wrong people and make all sorts of bad mistakes for which they would not be held accountable for? > -----Original Message----- > From: Andreas Kuntzagk [mailto:andreas.kuntzagk@mdc-berlin.de] > Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2003 9:42 AM > To: bugtraq@securityfocus.com > Subject: Re: Popular Net anonymity service back-doored > > > Am Don, 2003-08-21 um 06.56 schrieb Thomas C. Greene : > > Popular Net anonymity service back-doored > > Fed-up Feds get court order > > http://theregister.co.uk/content/55/32450.html > ... > > Please see the news release of the AN.ON project: > http://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/material/them> en/presse/anonip_e.htm > > "... Since it is not permissive to release information about > current proceedings according to German law, the project > partners did not inform the public at first. Based on the > fact that the developed software has been released in the > source code since the beginning of the Open Source Project, > also the implemented recording function was of course released. ..." > > Andreas > >
