36

DOUBLE JEOPARDY

Stuttgart, September 2007

Officer Dietmar Lingel was pleased with his work. A week
earlier his boss had given him the logs from the Canadian
webmail provider, hushmail. This email system was supposedly
watertight - nobody could read your correspondence if you were
using hushmail. This was largely true, but by 2007 the company
had caved in to pressure from the Canadian police and afforded
the cops access to log records. These revealed to an investigator
which IP address had been logging on to a particular email
account. And the RCMP had passed the logs for two accounts,
auto0432221@hushmail.com and auto496064@hushmail.com,
to Agent Mularski of the FBI.

Back in May 2007 Matrix001 had sent Keith Mularski a redacted
version of the anonymous email he had received warning him
that he was under surveillance by the German police. Mularski's
initial reaction was to assume that his colleagues at the US Secret
Service were responsible for the leak. At the time, the Feds and
the Secret Service were running competing operations into
DarkMarket, multiplying the possibility of a security breach out of
either incompetence or malice. But at least three overseas police
forces knew about Matrix: the British, the French and, of course,
the Germans.

Nobody from the police underestimated the importance of the
emails. Along with the possible existence of a mole was the equally
disturbing idea that someone had hacked into the computers
belonging to one of the investigating units. Operation DarkMarket
had begun in earnest, but the busts of Matrix001 and JiLsi were
just the start - the