Police Planning New Raid On The Pirate Bay

An anonymous reader writes "TorrentFreak reports that Swedish authorities are gearing up for another raid on the servers of The Pirate Bay. The site was raided once before, in 2006, and the evidence gathered at that time was sufficient to convict its founders. 'The authorities have obtained warrants to snoop around in sensitive places and two known anti-piracy prosecutors, Frederick Ingblad and Henrik Rasmusson, are said to be involved. Employing a little psychological warfare aimed at putting the investigators off-balance, the Pirate Bay team has chosen to make the news public to make the authorities aware that they are not the only ones being watched.'"

Comments

Isn't this getting a little silly?

[msobkow]

Now a "news" article essentially amounts to "someone posted a message about someone telling them that someone else said they'd..."

Are you serious? That chain of "evidence" is worse than most small town gossip!

And even if it's true -- so what? As convenient as it is, TPB is hardly the only torrent site in the world...

Re:Isn't this getting a little silly?

[erroneus]

It is the most significant one, in my opinion. If and when it's gone, it will become something of a symbol of what various governments are willing to do at the demands of the US government which is acting on the demands of the media/content publishers of the U.S.

The summary is a bit off in its depiction of history. The first raid on TPB resulted in the servers all being returned very quickly as there was nothing illegal about them in their country. There was no evidence collected from their servers that convicted anyone. That they exist and that the people who ran them did so was not in dispute and taking those servers down did nothing to prove anything.

What was significant and what is missed here is that it displayed perfectly the chain of influence at play. The story behind the first raid was pretty ugly. The raid was not going to happen at first because the police saw that no law was being broken by the site or its operators. Politics somehow overruled the law and the raid occurred. The stuff taken was returned and brought back online within a couple of days because it was all quite illegal. It was the US government's influence which was used to push the Swedish government to step beyond its own laws. And we already know who influences the US government to make them push its influence onto other sovereign nations.

As this is about to happen again, apparently, goes to show that the Swedish government has no respect for its own laws any more than the US has respect for its own constitution. It's getting to the point where "respect for the law" is the exclusive domain of those who are ruled and not at all for the rulers.

Re:Isn't this getting a little silly?

[TheGratefulNet]

It's getting to the point where "respect for the law" is the exclusive domain of those who are ruled and not at all for the rulers.

I'm an old and cranky man. but I see no country that exhibits freedom the way we all THOUGHT it would be.

lies and lies. freedom is a thing that exists for the rich and powerful.

the sooner we all wake up and see the evil in ALL our governments, the sooner we'll be able to fix this world wide problem.

its not US, its not england, its not sweden, its not australia. its EVERY place that has humans running things. humans make a nice cozy place for themselves and ensure that things are good for the ruling class and less good for those who are not part of this.

why is this ever thought of as nationalistic? again, every country is run by people and people have flaws in their nature that lets 'power corrupt'. we've known this forever, haven't we?

stop believing the propaganda that your country is somehow more free or just than some other. its not true. you only think its true due to brainwashing and the 'us vs them' mentality that countries LOVE to instill in its people.

respect for law means nothing. if you have the money, you can make laws or side-step them. IN EVERY COUNTRY.

Re:Isn't this getting a little silly?

[number11]

The story behind the first raid was pretty ugly. The raid was not going to happen at first because the police saw that no law was being broken by the site or its operators. Politics somehow overruled the law and the raid occurred. The stuff taken was returned and brought back online within a couple of days because it was all quite illegal. It was the US government's influence which was used to push the Swedish government to step beyond its own laws. And we already know who influences the US government to make them push its influence onto other sovereign nations.

Which, parenthetically, shows why Julian Assange is so unenthusiastic about being extradited back to Sweden.

Re:Move it to .onion

[Samantha Wright]

Unfortunately, the Onion (America's Finest News Source) has been prevented from registering a TLD. Sources suggest their rejection by ICANN was a real tear-jerker.

Blocked

[BenV666]

Since the piratebay IPs are blocked by my ISP these days (and redirect me to http://www.xs4all.nl/geblokkeerd/ ) I have to use a proxy to get around it.
Here's a link for those of you in the same boat: http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://thepiratebay.se/blog/209

Re:Blocked

[Anonymous Coward]

The Blog Post:

New TPB investigation leaked

TPB is not hosted in -insert country here-, as far as we know. "As far as we know?" you might ask! Yes. TPB is set up in a very special way to make sure that it will stay up. This means that noone really knows exactly where the servers are, but we've made sure to stay out of the United States of Arrogance and some other countries where the governments do not like free speech.

The only box someone could find is the one in the front, that needs to be public. We have multiple of those, scattered like diarrhea around the world. They contain no storage device, no graphics card. Only a network cable, a cpu and memory. Being nice people, we've put small easters egg into each box though, for the hard work put into finding that public machine! Nothing dangerous though, just funny.

Even though this means that TPB can never be pin-pointed to a certain country, the Swedish district attorney Fredrik Ingblad initiated a new investigation into The Pirate Bay back in 2010. Information has been leaked to us every now and then by multiple sources, almost on a regular basis. It's an interesting read. We can certainly understand why WikiLeaks wished to be hosted in Sweden, since so much data leaks there. The reason that we get the leaks is usually that the whistleblowers does not agree with what is going on. Something that the governments should have in mind - even your own people does not agree.

Since our recent move to a .SE domain the investigation has been cranked up a notch. We think that the investigation is interesting considering nothing that TPB does is illegal. Rather we find it interesting that a country like Sweden is being so abused by lobbyists and that this can be kept up. They're using scare tactics, putting pressure on the wrong people, like providers and users. All out of fear from the big country in the west, and with an admiration for their big fancy wallets.

We're staying put where we are. We're going no-where. But we have a message to hollywood, the investigators and the prosecutors: LOL.

Re:Move it to .onion

[berashith]

booo. too many layers to this joke!

Re:Magnet links?

[danomac]

Strange you should say that, works fine for me.

rtorrent-0.8.9/libtorrent-0.12.9

It took them a while to add it, but it is there. (No, this wasn't compiled with a patch, like you had to do early on...)

So let's do something about it.

[owenferguson]

Help with the backup. You can own the entire contents of TPB by downloading just 90MB of magnet links in one torrent here: http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7016365/The_whole_Pirate_Bay_magnet_archive

Re:So let's do something about it.

[Lumpy]

Actually you use that time to find out how to emigrate to a country that has reaj jobs. Because here in the USA, there are no jobs that pay enough to afford paying for software, music, movies, etc...

Re:So let's do something about it.

[icebraining]

For the software music and movies... Do you really need those? They sound like frivolousness entertainment to me.

Do you really need to post here?

Entertainment made my people who work to get paid for their effort. If you cannot afford it... Go without.

Why? Absolutely no one benefits from you going without instead of downloading.

They monitor the Piracy off their stuff, if they find that it is heavily pirated then they know people like the product, and they find value with it...

You are using Slashdot, so you clearly find value in it. But would you pay $150/month to use Slashdot? If not, why not?

Finding value does NOT mean that 1) it's worth to the person whatever the seller is asking for it, 2) the person can afford it.

Re:Move it to .onion

[Samantha Wright]

I take it you're onionspired, then?

Ask and ye shall receive - Full text of article

[Gazzonyx]

Leaked: Police Plan to Raid The Pirate Bay ErnestoMarch 9, 2012131 raid,

More than half a decade after Swedish police officers first raided The Pirate Bay, there is talk that a second police raid against the world’s most famous torrent site is in the planning. The Pirate Bay team has learned that local authorities have acquired warrants to take action against the site, and expect that both servers and the new .se domain name may be targeted soon.

In the spring of 2006 a team of 65 Swedish police personnel entered a datacenter in Stockholm. The officers were tasked with shutting down the largest threat to the entertainment industry at the time – The Pirate Bay’s servers.

The raid eventually led to the conviction of four people connected to The Pirate Bay, but the site itself remained online.

Today, the Pirate Bay team has informed TorrentFreak that a second raid is being prepared by the Swedish authorities. The site’s operators, who are well-connected in multiple ways, learned that a team of Swedish investigators is gearing up to move against the site in the future. The suspicions were also made public by The Pirate Bay a few minutes ago. “The Swedish district attorney Fredrik Ingblad initiated a new investigation into The Pirate Bay back in 2010. Information has been leaked to us every now and then by multiple sources, almost on a regular basis. It’s an interesting read,” the Pirate Bay crew notes. “We can certainly understand why WikiLeaks wished to be hosted in Sweden, since so much data leaks there. The reason that we get the leaks is usually that the whistleblowers do not agree with what is going on. Something that the governments should have in mind – even your own people do not agree.” The Pirate Bay team confirmed to TorrentFreak that the announcement is no prank. The authorities have obtained warrants to snoop around in sensitive places and two known anti-piracy prosecutors, Frederick Ingblad and Henrik Rasmusson, are said to be involved. Employing a little psychological warfare aimed at putting the investigators off-balance, the Pirate Bay team has chosen to make the news public to make the authorities aware that they are not the only ones being watched. According to The Pirate Bay team they aren’t doing anything illegal, but nonetheless they noticed that the investigation intensified after the site’s recent move to a .SE domain. “Since our recent move to a .SE domain the investigation has been cranked up a notch. We think that the investigation is interesting considering nothing that TPB does is illegal,” they say. “Rather we find it interesting that a country like Sweden is being so abused by lobbyists and that this can be kept up. They’re using scare tactics, putting pressure on the wrong people, like providers and users. All out of fear from the big country in the west, and with an admiration for their big fancy wallets.” Behind the scenes The Pirate Bay team is working hard to ensure that the site will remain online in the event that servers, domain names and Internet routes are cut off. In this regard The Pirate Bay has learned a valuable lesson from its former operators. Those who are aware of the site’s history know that without a few essential keystrokes in May 2006, The Pirate Bay may not have been here today. When Pirate Bay founder TiAMO heard that something was amiss, he decided to make a full backup of the site before heading off to the datacenter, where he was greeted by dozens of police officers.

TiAMO’s decision to start a backup of the site is probably the most pivotal moment in the site’s history. Because of this backup the Pirate Bay team were able to resurrect the site within three days. If there hadn’t have been a recent backup, things may have turned out quite differently. It was a close call at the time, and a defining moment in the history of the site. The dete

Thought they were hosted by parliment now?

[shaitand]

I was under the impression that the site was hosted by the pirate party as a function of office now and thus gained immunity to prosecution in Sweden?

Re:Magnet links?

[Rakshasa-sensei]

I've never really used magnet links that much so there's bound to be some issues, however due to the TPB change I'll be looking closer at that code in the near future. There's seems to be some magnet links that aren't supported properly...

In any case please do realize that there's no 'they' in rtorrent, at the best I had one guy sending me patches for DHT support and various other stuff. Pretty much a one man project, so I'll mainly be focusing on stuff certain users pay me to implement.

Re:Magnet links?

[wanzeo]

The Pirate Bay's days are numbered. With the move to magnet links, their entire "collection" takes about 100MB. That is small enough that every user can have a copy that slowly updates between connected users. For an up and coming implementation of this, see Tribler.

If all p2p switched to a similar method, the only targets for authorities would be IP addresses in the swarm. Right now that rarely happens, but it could very easily become commonplace if there are no big targets left.

Re:Magnet links?

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Since my programming skills are definitely inadequate, I just donated $20 to you instead.

Thank you for a great piece of software, screen+rtorrent will never be beat, as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Magnet links?

[Rakshasa-sensei]

The latest version (to be released soon) will be much more aggressive at contacting trackers, so the dead tracker issue is gone.

Re:Magnet links?

[tlhIngan]

It depends. A magnet link can store a LOT of information - it can be anywhere from a hash to a complete torrent file in a link. Or it can be a redirect to a different site hosting the torrent file.

It's actually important to know the difference because one requires the use of DHT, while the others simply point the torrent client elsewhere to fetch the torrent file.

Heck, TPB stopped their trackers years ago - but that didn't mean they went completely DHT - they just used a lot of other trackers out there

All TPB's doing is really turning themselves into a google for torrents.

How many TB for PB?

[Anonymous Coward]

The police are panning a new RAID on the pirate bay? Cool! How many TB will they be adding?

Re:Very Kill Bill-ish

[Anomalyst]

Anyone who has played Sierra's Police Quest could tell you that is a PR-24 Nightstick ;)

Does the "PR" stand for "Public Relations"?

Re:Text for le blocked

[cpu6502]

The fire in a theater argument is actually flawed. It was part of the Supreme Court's desire to keep President Wilson happy because the president wanted to lock-up and silence the anti-war protestors and writers (also suffragettes). i.e. They gave the president permission to trample the first amendment.

The Court was wrong. The anti-war people of the time were equivalent to a person standing OUTSIDE a theater and warning people, "Don't go or else you risk dying. It's dangerous." Which is protected speech and a perfectly valid thing to do.

Just as the Supreme Court was wrong to say segregation was legal, the court was wrong to allow President Wilson to silence the anti-war critics and lock them in jail. Or to apply the invalid fire-in-a-theater argument to justify it.