ZORRO UNMASKED

190, Email from Keith Mularski dated 09.03.2007: He paid me
for the Server.

Kai was startled. He read the key sentence again. Master Splynter is
me. Not only was Detlef Hartmann correct that the FBI had been on
his cyber tail, but the prosecutor's office had named the agent and his
alias. The game was up and he, Kai Laufen, had uncovered the truth
about one of the world's most prominent cybercops. Three months
earlier he had barely heard of cybercrime.

When Kai called the National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance in
Pittsburgh, he was put straight through to Keith Mularski, whose
manner was, as always, most accommodating. But as the journalist
read the sentence from the email – Master Splynter is me – there was
total silence on the other end of the line. Keith knew he had been
nailed. On the bright side, he had been nailed by a radio journalist in
south-western Germany and there was an outside chance, even in the
age of the Internet, that the news might not get much further than
the borders of Baden-Württemberg. In his heart, however, he knew
that it really was an outside chance.

Was this the famous leak again?

Kai Laufen was unaware that Stuttgart's police Commissioner had
for a second time sanctioned the suspension of Dietmar Lingel from
the force. On this occasion, however, they suspected the officer of
having intentionally fed Mularski's name and alias to the prosecutor
for inclusion in his outline of the case. Lingel's aim, it was alleged,
was to bring Mularski's identity into the public domain as a way of
discrediting the FBI. The motivation, the Commissioner claimed, lay
in Lingel's dissatisfaction with some of the policing methods involved
in the Hartmann investigation.

The allegations against Lingel served to highlight fundamental differ-
ences in the philosophy of law enforcement in Europe and the United
States. Europeans tend to shun sting operations as risky, as well as
morally and legally questionable. The Americans by contrast use them
frequently. There is an intense debate in America as to where a sting
ends and entrapment begins. In Europe some police officers regarded
the DarkMarket operation as verging on entrapment, especially as the
Secret Service, in particular, seemed to encourage members to engage
in criminal activity (in the case of Dron) during their investigation.