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Sweden to Make Denial of Service Attacks Illegal

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the play-nicer dept.

paulraps writes "Sweden is to pass legislation making Denial of Service attacks illegal. The offense will carry a maximum jail term of two years, and is thought to be a direct response to the attack which crashed the Swedish police's web site last summer. Nobody was charged for that, but the fact that it came shortly after a raid on the Pirate Bay's servers was thought by many to be not entirely coincidental. Sweden's move follows the UK, which is even tougher on web attackers — there the sentence can be over five years in prison."

2 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Mostly pointless... by Xemu · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As most of the time DOS attacks are performed from outside the country, and therefor outside its juridiction, I doubt they'll even invoke it in court.

    This law will allow the police to obtain the identity of the person using the IP address that is used for the DOS attack, even if this DOS attack is directed from Sweden to the outside world. I am sure there is a large amount of political pressure from the US in this matter and Swedish politicians are easy to intimidate.

    It is important to note that the sentence term of 2 years was not chosen at random. When a crime carries this sentence as a possiblity, the Swedish police gets greater powers to use surveillance, wiretapping and raids to secure evidence such as the identity of person using a specific IP address.

    In fact, this is also why thePiratebay.org exists and is so successful - since file sharing carries a sentence which is usually much less than 2 years, the police are not allowed to raid or subpoena the ISPs for the identity of the person that is using a specific IP address. (The Swedish MPAA aka APB have treid hard to get a criminal conviction for file sharing for this reason.)

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  2. Re:Mostly pointless... by sr180 · · Score: 5, Informative

    In fact, this is also why thePiratebay.org exists and is so successful - since file sharing carries a sentence which is usually much less than 2 years, the police are not allowed to raid or subpoena the ISPs for the identity of the person that is using a specific IP address. (The Swedish MPAA aka APB have treid hard to get a criminal conviction for file sharing for this reason.)

    No. The pirate bay exists because its not illegal to link to illegal copyrighted material in Sweeden. The pirate bay doesnt share illegal material, just torrent files, which are essentially a link to where the material actually is.

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    In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!