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The FBI and Keith Mularski vigorously defended their actions, empha- sizing that the presence of Mularski and his team on DarkMarket enabled intelligence-gathering — notably about the intended expansion of Cha0’s US operation — which prevented, so Mularski claimed, $70 million in potential losses.

Just as he was putting the finishing touches to his radio feature on this peculiar, yet important story, Kai Laufen suffered a slipped disc. Almost completely unable to move, the journalist was forced to brood in bed for two weeks. He arrived at the conclusion that nobody in Germany would care about the fact that the FBI had busted a German carder and that he, Kai, had uncovered the agent’s identity. On the other hand, the DarkMarket story had attracted considerable attention in the US tech media. Led by the San Francisco-based Wired magazine, a fair amount had already been published on the subject, especially after the dramatic kidnapping of Mert Ortaç in April that year and then the arrest of Cha0 in September.

Kai felt strongly that he should disseminate the proof that Dark- Market was in part an FBI sting operation. But just as the Atlantic divides the culture of policing, so it does the ethical standards of German journalists and their Anglo-American counterparts. (Britain’s police are more European than American, but their newshounds have even fewer scruples than America’s do.)

In Germany it is considered bad form to publish the full names of alleged criminals while they are still on trial, and in many cases the German media desist from doing so even if the criminals are subse- quently found guilty. The same goes for undercover police agents. For anybody familiar with the Anglo-American media, the notion is, of course, as foreign as can possibly be.

So when Kai Laufen spoke by phone to Kevin Poulsen, Wired maga- zine’s Security Editor, in early October 2008, he said that he would provide Mr Poulsen with documentary evidence which proved that law enforcement had penetrated DarkMarket. He would include Keith Mularski’s email admission of his role as Master Splyntr, but only on the strict condition that Poulsen did not publish Mularski’s name. Reiterating the point, Laufen ended his email, which included the document scans, with the exhortation: ‘Burn after reading!’

Poulsen remembers it differently: he only agreed to keep Matrix’s name out of the paper. Over the years he and his team had done an

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