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Pirate Bay Co-Founder Indicted For Hacking, Fraud
An anonymous reader writes "Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, a.k.a. 'anakata,' co-founder of The Pirate Bay, has been indicted by a Swedish court on charges of computer hacking and fraud. The prosecuting attorney said, 'A large amount of data from companies and agencies was taken during the hack, including a large amount of personal data, such as personal identity numbers of people with protected identities.' According to Ars, 'The first count of hacking involves allegedly unlawfully using another person's username and password to search Infotorg, a well-known massive privately held commercial database of "private individuals, companies, properties and vehicles." The second count, as previously reported, involves an alleged hack dating back to 2010 of Logica, a Swedish IT firm that contracts with the Swedish tax authority. In March 2012, Logica was hit by an online attack that resulted in around 9,000 Swedes (Google Translate) having their personal identity numbers and names released to the public. ... The third count of hacking, allegedly taking place between July and August 2012, accuses Svartholm Warg of unauthorized access of major Nordic region bank Nordea's computers. The fraud charges accuse Svartholm Warg of allegedly transferring and attempting to transfer money from Nordea to other unauthorized bank accounts.'"
One is that the Swedish prosecution is hopelessly corrupt
Okay, I'mma let you finish, but I just wanted to know... how's Julian Assange doing? I heard something about... something happening in Sweden... something about... being hopelessly corrupt, something about the United States and backroom deals. Oh, sorry for interrupting you. Please, continue...
and has decided to level very, very specific yet trumped up charges against him,
Rule #1 about lying? Be specific. And Rule #1 about prosecuting? Trump it up -- it gives you something to negotiate with. Also, it may scare the defendant into cutting a deal. So both of these are things routinely done by any prosecutor. Routinely.
The other is that a guy who made profits out of massive piracy of other peoples work doesn't have any moral qualms about stealing things from other peoples computers. Note that even his friend/partner in crime Sunde isn't willing to actually state in public he thinks the guy is innocent - rather telling.
Okay, let me fix this for you: The other is that a guy who knows the government is looking for a reason to bring him down. Any reason. And this guy's obviously intelligent and literate; He built one of the largest websites on the internet. So we're left to ponder... just why would someone who's intelligent, and well-known, and the government is watching his every move, do something so heineously stupid? Ah well, we can always fall back on Well he must have been doing something!(tm) Because you know, the police would never stoop so low as to come up with bogus charges just to shut someone up they find irritating. So, wanna come with me to the protest later this afternoon?
Note that even his friend/partner in crime Sunde isn't willing to actually state in public he thinks the guy is innocent - rather telling.
Right. Not talking to the police is a sure sign of guilt. Because the interrogator doesn't have 25 years of experience in getting confessions out of people, and turning even the most innocent and and exculpatory statement into something that can be used to crucify the guy. He's just a totally nice guy who I'm sure really just wants to help out the accomplice here. And I'm George Washington.
Your argument is a house of cards. It's stacked with bullshit emotive reasoning and not a lick of actual evidence. Which is not unlike the government's case! But hey, when there's a society full of people like you willing to crucify someone based only on mere appearances of impropriety, who needs evidence?
Which is actually rather my point here -- not to blast you out of the water (though, incidentally, I did), but to point out that such errors in reasoning are so common that they contribute massively to our prison overpopulation and the convictions of innocent people. Because people are mostly emotional, not logical -- and they're swayed easily by appearances, not facts. See also: The Innocence Project. Such problems are so commonplace that there's an entire organization dedicated simply to picking out people they can prove beyond any doubt are totally and completely innocent, and then fighting (hard, I might add!) to get the justice system to, I don't know... be just? Releasing the wrongly convicted, even in the case of overwhelming evidence of innocence, is actually really, really hard. And all of this, this entire issue -- is because of logic just like yours. Emotional reasoning.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Jebus, people. Is it really so impossible that a nerdy hacker person who made a website that you like did some cracking that was against the law? Even leaving the Assange stuff aside, I remember how Slashdotters were continuing to argue that Hans Reiser was innocent, even after it was pretty incontrovertibly established that it was obvious he had killed his wife. If OJ Simpson had written Emacs instead of playing football, Slashdotters would still be defending him.
For a group of people that espouses to value critical thinking so highly, Slashdotters as a group seem to be rife with confirmation bias and a predilection for conspiracy theories. Sometimes, people you want to like do things that are wrong - even criminal. And there doesn't always have to be some big conspiracy behind it.
"95% of all Slashdot