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By Root 303 0

were to prove an exacting period for Detective Spencer Frizzell of the Calgary Police Service. The Secret Service offices in Buffalo and Vancouver would provide him with one IP address, which they received from Safemail each time the undercover agent exchanged an email with Dron. These addresses always belonged to some Internet café or other. By the time he had actually located the place, the bird had of course flown. Until he started on this case, Detective Frizzell had no idea that there were so many Internet cafés in Calgary or how popular they were. He felt increasingly as if he were looking for a needle in a haystack.

For months, Dron’s use of Internet cafés appeared to be random. One day he would pop up here, the next day three miles away. Sometimes he disappeared from Calgary altogether, raising the fear that he was gone for good. But he always returned and, after several months, Frizzell had a major breakthrough. Pinning flags on a map, he spotted that all of Dron’s Internet cafés were close to the stops on Calgary’s Light Rail Transit, on the line that runs from Somerset to Crowfoot. He also noted two or three shops that Dron seemed to favour.

That meant he had enough information to apply for a surveillance team. He came up against the usual objections that cybercops the world over encounter. Who are the victims in Calgary? What is your evidence of turnover due to criminal activity?

Frizzell received his authorisation, but only for a limited period and with very few human resources. Generally, when he received a tip-off from the Secret Service that Dron was online, he would grab anyone he could from the office and head out for somewhere along the Light Rail Transit.

The Calgary detective performed a heroic job for more than a year, slowly narrowing down the suspects until he was convinced he had the man. What he didn’t know was that he was at just one of the sharp ends of a larger Secret Service operation that included not only Dron, but also a number of targets in Europe. The US SS had contacted SOCA in London and the OCLCTIC in Paris. ‘That’s the way we operate,’ said the Secret Service spokesman, Edwin Donovan. ‘We really push out our collaborative effort, working with police all over the world. We go to the agency that’s working these type of crimes and say that we have this target – and of course sharing information is a key in these cases.’

So the Secret Service was sharing information with the police in Britain, Canada and France. But one group of agents they still weren’t sharing it with was their colleagues at the FBI. The evident rancour between the two US agencies sowed confusion among the Europeans – in the end, the French worked with the US SS, the Germans with the FBI and the British politely balanced the two. This resulted in a moment of profound irony, as the only people in the world who knew that the FBI and Secret Service were targeting the same person, JiLsi, belonged to a foreign police force, the Serious Organised Crime Agency in London. It got worse – officers from SOCA realised that the competing American forces were actually investigating each other’s undercover agents as suspected criminals. Eventually a senior British civil servant gently informed a higher authority in Washington that perhaps the FBI and the Secret Service should put aside their differences, at least for the duration of the investigation.

22

DUDE YOU FUCKED UP

Baden-Württemberg, 2007

It was a pleasant evening in early May, although it didn’t feel much like springtime to Matrix001. The external world receded as his mouth dried and his eyes ran over the email one more time.

Your landline is tapped.

Cops in UK, Germany, France are onto you … Hide evidence. Warn others … Cops know matrix-001 is detlef hartmann from eislingen …

You only got a few weeks before cops hit in uk and france … Warn all carders you can get hold of.

What did this mean? Who did it come from? He looked at the sender’s address again: auto432221@hushmail.com. That was probably randomly generated. And it was impossible to identify