RE: legality of sacrificial host to prosecute

[FMartins () pt imshealth com (Lisbon)]

Hi2all

John, I agree with almost everything you said, my point is that one thing is to discuss things, and other the real life.
When we say "this is legal or this is not legal" the question is WHERE?
If you have any practice in tracing attackers, you know that in many countries laws are not the same, and sometimes the 
attacker goes free just because in his own country what he did was just not even specified in his country laws.

The best exemple i can give you without make any law research, is that "entrapment" is not defined in portuguese laws 
about cybercrime.

Then ... one thing is we know "this" guy did "that" and its illegall, other is to prove that ...
So, in some countries its not very dificult at all a good lawyer take "this" guy out, using my agumentation in last 
mail for example, or adding that a log is just am ascii editable text file not certificated by anyone.

For example, even video tapes just recently are authorized here as a valid prove in a court of law, and there is many 
topics like this.
Other example is that here we dont have an certification authority for digital signatures, and so on ...

I'll not say "i and at least other person have said", because i can say by practice that things work like this. If i 
want to refer to people, i can say that i had discuss this with people in FBI and here with the local police, when 
people ask me for help about security problems.

I know that if a jewelry puts fakes in a window, that does not provide a thief any defense. My point was just that this 
kind of argumentation in a court of law many times is not so clear after all.

Internet is worldwide, a specific law is not. 

About NSAKey, as an X-Files lover i invite you to add that with what will happend in the next 21th ... but of course, 
NSA doesnt have all that power, does it?
http://www.kitetoa.com/Pages/Textes/Les_Dossiers/Weird/ajouts_modifs-hamsandwiches.htm (read The Alien from Seattle)

Well, and now i must tell you my personal example ... i did use to run tests in some friend servers, because he allways 
thanks me for pointing problems there (he had give me authorization for that a long time ago ... years ago), after we 
had some personal problems, in one of my latest test (i did stop after this), i was acused of hacking his web server, 
when all i did was using IE5 as FTP client, in a Win98 box against all mighty Linux. Indeed he did never understand me, 
or forgive me. I just had copy as much perl script i was able by CHMOD, nothing more. He did recognized that it was 
just an entrapment by a honeypot, where i was, so why was i acused of bad intentions when he knows that i never did 
nothing without his authorization, nor damage anything, nor modify, add of delete NOTHING. I just used a bad browser in 
a bad server, with authorization, but after all i was acused of hacking.

Kind Regards,
Fernando Martins