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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.

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