Ok, this is strange and worth following on.
Through Boing Boing I found this article on Security Fix’s Brian Krebs’ blog talking about the arrest of Steven Rambam, owner and CEO of Pallorium Inc., a company that does online investigations.
Rambam was about to start a panel discussion on privacy at the HOPE hacker conference, when four FBI agents asked him to step out with them and then handcuffed him and led him away, carrying also his laptop and other equipment.
Nobody knows where the feds took him to, and Eric Corley (aka Emmanuel Goldstein, founder of 2600) said that the HOPE organizers were contacting Rambam’s parents and lawyer, as well as trying to find out where he had been taken to.
If the arrest isn’t a PR trick (Rambam has been known to be very flamboyant and prone to publicity stunts), then it’d be nice to know *why* he was arrested and where he was taken to. Unfortunately, there’s not much information at the moment…the HOPE site is either slashdotted or under DDoS (I’m inclined to think slashdotted), so I have no clue if there’s information there conserning the arrest. The place and timing of the arrest make me have dark thoughts about the FBI’s actions.
UPDATE: About an hour ago, the article in Brian’s blog was updated. He contacted the FBI’s New York field office and they confirmed that Rambam was indeed arrested, but they are not willing to say anything about it until Monday, when he’ll be presented to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. On the other hand, the rumour mill at the conference is propagating that the arrest *may* be because Rambam may have located somebody who was in the FBI’s witness protection program.
If that last is true…well, I can understand why they arrested him…I’m pretty sure that doing that is against the law…and as much as I’m pro-freedom and pro-privacy, I’m also pro-law…even if the law is stupid, it should be obeyed…until somebody manages to make it unstupid :)
UPDATE #2: Ok, the charges have been revealed and they are…tampering with a federal witness and obstruction of justice…ouch! According to the feds, Rambam (or Rombom, as it appears in the official complaint [available here as a PDF], saying Rambam is an alias) found a guy who was a witness against Alberto Santoro, a former Brooklyn assistant district attorney who was indicted in 2003 of money laundering for drug dealers and presented himself as an FBI agent.
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