American Police Refused To Hand Over Hackers To France

While the American government requires that UK citizens are dragged into one of their courts to face sixty-year sentences, it looks like it is not even reluctant to hand over one of its own hackers over to a more sensible French court.

The US cyclist Floyd Landis had a go at cracking the PCs of the anti-doping lab that found him cheating during Tour de France 6 years ago. He was charged by the court in Paris, which heard how he and his former coach refused to show up in court. In addition, they both were helped by the government of the United States that refused to co-operate against the US hackers.

It turned out that Landis was similar to a UK hacker looking for UFOs or an Australian who published secret tapes of the US helicopter pilots who laughed as they gun down Reuters journalists. Anyway, the authorities seem to be reluctant to hand over American sporting heroes when they do the same sort of thing.

In fact, the French did have enough evidence to convict both Landis and Baker after a Trojan horse spy program was used 6 years ago to poke into the lab's servers to extract data about Landis' file, several months after he tested positive. After this, Landis admitted that he took drugs in his career. Meanwhile, the police explained that they couldn’t turn up who exactly ordered the hacking, thanks to the American authorities sitting on their hands. The data received during the hack was later used in an unsuccessful appeal to sports authorities. It was supposed to prove that Landis was clean and that the lab work was actually faulty. The court decided that Landis' role was limited to the knowledge that he had about the fraudulent origin of the laboratory data used by him and his defense team. The court also ruled that Landis knew that these lab results were really accurate, because he would admit 4 years later that he had taken drugs since 2002.

While Landis didn’t comment the trial, Baker insisted that the charges weren’t true. He said that he had nothing to do with any hacking and as far as he knew, the lab papers he received while serving as an expert consultant to the legal team were received in a legal way. He believes that everything is part of a plot to protect the laboratory, which appears to be a national French institution. As a result, they were both given a year's suspended sentences, which means that there’s probably nothing to worry about unless they ever commit another crime in this country again.

Federal Trojan Used In Germany

Last week, the country’s Chaos Computer Club published a detailed analysis of the state trojan used by different police forces for spying on suspects. The outfit pointed out that the trojan in question breached tight limits set by the country’s highest court.

Restrictions imposed by the high court limited any kind of trojan used by police and other intelligence services to surveillance of voice chats via Skype. Nevertheless, it turned out the police have simply ignored the order of the Federal Constitutional Court and kept using an insecure and shoddily programmed trojan that offered much more features than was allowed.

Aside from being badly programmed and insecure, the trojan also allowed to download and install different modules. In theory, investigators can go as far as to search HDDs and manipulate information. Meanwhile, commands transmitted to the trojan aren’t even encrypted, and only one single key was used for all the trojans. Information transferred from computers and commands is routed through a server located somewhere in the United States, outside of German law.

Different antivirus outfits called trojan R2D2 because of the inclusion of C3PO, R2D2 and POE into the code. It was developed by a German company named Digitask, whose CEO and founder was sentenced to almost 2 years probation and a 1.5 million euro fine a decade ago for bribing state employees at the Customs Criminal Office in Cologne. After this his company renamed itself and continued selling services to state agencies.

One of such trojans was sent to the club by one of the German lawyers: it turned out that Bavarian state police installed it on the PC of his client during the investigation on drug-related charges. The trojan forwarded screenshots to the police that were in clear breach of the legislation. However, later the court found out that the police had no legal basis to do that. The matter is that the Bavarian police couldn’t make use of a trojan to track this person, as the high court restricted not just the means of surveillance, but also in which cases a trojan could be used by the police. These cases are clearly limited to the most serious crimes, and the charges against the individual in question were not that serious.

By the way, Bavaria wasn’t the only region to use the Trojan – police of other states employed it to monitor suspects against facing an international arrest warrants as well.