UK Police Charge Suspected Anonymous Spokesman

An anonymous reader writes "Scotland Yard has tonight charged 18-year-old Jake Davis, who was arrested in the Shetland Islands last week, with five offenses including unauthorized computer access and conspiracy to carry out a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack against the SOCA (Serious Organized Crime Agency) website. When announcing his arrest on Wednesday, police said that they believed Davis used the online nickname 'Topiary' and acted as the spokesperson for the Anonymous and LulzSec hacking groups. Topiary's final twitter message said 'You can't arrest an idea' just before his arrest."

Comments

Re:Today's lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

That does not matter.
Do you think the riots which resulted in many death in other countries were the "right way" to do it? Probably not.
The point is that no other way works. You can't spend 30 years of your life trying to get a big political party and get shot down by your own guys after those 30 years. What you can do is protest. And if you protest, it's not going to be an email or a blog post, even not a public performance.
You protest with things that everyone is going to _care_ about.

Riots. Hacking high level web sites. Whatever else. At least, they don't kill people or destroy their lives - the government does that, daily, if you haven't noticed. That the proven way to change things, so far.

What I find the most sad, is such arguments as "real activists" "saving lives". It sounds like "and also they capture pedophiles" and such crap. They don't save lives. They also don't do shit. If you haven't noticed that either, the governments, corporations haven't changed, and never do, until a revolution rise. How long do your real activists need, 100, 200, 500 years? Please, get a fucking clue.

Revolutions started by riots, and other such acts,once again. Hacking is part of that, now.

Re:You can arrest the person

[mat catastrophe]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/internet-abuzz-with-claims-that-uk-police-picked-up-the-wrong-topiary.ars

It's possible that they are tossing the police ringers.

Re:Today's lesson

[risom]

Anarchy has never benefited a single country on the face of the planet.

I am not a fan of Anarchism as a political system, but that sentence is empirically wrong. In early 20th century europe there were at least two cases I know of, Ukraine and Spain, where Anarchism lasted for a while, and was pretty successful in economical terms. For Spain for example it's more or less proven that the anarchist period saw a sharp rise in worker productivity.
Both didn't last long in the grand scale of things, but their military defeat does not relate to them being anarchist regions - they were just small and didn't have a chance against their much more powerful enemy (Spain: The spanish fascist movement with support from other fascist movements from all over Europe; Ukraine: the Red Army).

Re:You can arrest the person

[AmiMoJo]

It wouldn't be the first time. The UK police have no problem arresting people based on the flimsiest of evidence and then hoping they will crack during questioning. Unfortunately what tends to happen is that the person doesn't admit to something they didn't do and they end up dragging it out for as long as possible and then trying to bullshit their way to a conviction in court. If the defence lawyer is any good they get some experts in to refute the evidence, but unfortunately there is a tendency not to do that if the prosecution has already decided to use an expert witness because it is assumed that said witness will be impartial and objective.

Operation Ore is the most notorious example of police relying on clearly flawed evidence, but there are many others. In Operation Ore they received a large number of credit card numbers that had been used to pay for child pornography from US police and simply arrested all the card holders. They didn't bother to check if the card details had been stolen, they just rushed in and destroyed dozens of lives for a few easy headlines.

The only Omagh bombing suspect's trial collapsed because all they had was weak DNA evidence which matched him and a schoolboy in England. Barry George did several years in prison based on a single spec of gunpowder found on his clothes, which were stored in a room containing other garments with gunpowder on them.