14 DAY TRIAL // On April 24, FBI representatives in charge of investigating the bomb threats made against the University of Pittsburgh paid a visit to an Austrian anonymous remailer provider whose services may have been utilized by the criminal.
This comes after last week US authorities seized Riseup Networks’ server that hosted the Mixmaster anonymity service.
“Today, the police arrived with a court order that allowed them to create a forensic disk image of the austria remailer. This apparently was on request of the US authorities, related to the Pittsburgh bomb threats,” Christian Mock said. “Therefore, I had to destroy any existing keys and create new keys.”
Furthermore, Mock believes that the agents may have installed a backdoor on the machine. He stated that the entire system would be reinstalled, but that it might take a few weeks before he could complete the task.
“The remailer's private keys are compromised, so any message that was encrypted to those keys can be decrypted, *if* it was intercepted in the form it reached the austria remailer,” he explained.
Many of the service’s users were astonished by the incident, but this just comes to highlight the powers of US authorities worldwide.
Even the owner of the remailer seems to be surprised of the police’s visit, especially since the service’s purpose is to help those that need anonymity for legitimate purposes, not criminals.
“We don't have cops kicking in our doors at dawn; in fact, this is the first physical visit of police at the hosting site. Most of the police contact is by mail or phone, where I politely explain to them what a remailer is and what it is for and how it works and that therefore, there's not any bit of evidence to be had, and they politely thank me,” Mock revealed.