
Just a side note
The FBI managed to track him down without a backdoor (or facial recognition).
Just good old fashioned police work
The Russian hacker accused of raiding LinkedIn, Dropbox and Formspring, and obtaining data on 213 million user accounts, has been found guilty. On Friday, Yevgeniy Nikulin was convicted [PDF] by a San Francisco jury of committing computer intrusion, data theft, and other charges [PDF] relating to the databases he broke into …
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>The FBI managed to track him down without a backdoor (or facial recognition).
Wouldn't be so sure about that, suspect somewhere in all the 'evidence' you'll find some "anonymous tip off" that resulted in the FBI just so happening to discover his IP address, location of his servers etc. etc.
Remember the prosecution only release the 'evidence' after they have constructed the evidence trial, not before. Expect also that they had numerous other negative accusations that weren't evidenced but were only there to help them portray the guy as a bad one for the benefit of the jury...
As you say, the stitch-up is just good old fashioned police work...
Rereading the article and also reading the indictment, the fingerprints of the NSA are all over the evidence. The smoking gun is revealed by the statement:
The FBI in response said that it had tracked Nikulin down to his Moscow apartment by following the hacker’s IP addresses and then confirmed it was him by observing his communications with others.
Remember Moscow is in Russia and I would assume Nikulin's Interent connection doesn't use a static IP address, so his ISP's systems would need to have been accessed...
Interestingly, no information is given about the identities of the three Co-conspirators - either online or physical.
Given the length of sentence possible under the CFAA and the conditions in US prisons, can you really blame them? When was the last time you heard someone fight extradition to Denmark or Germany for hacking related charges?
Things have improved since Attica but I think I'd prefer a long term stay in a mental institution to even 1 year in a US federal prison.