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Pirate Bay Founder Warg Being Held in Solitary Confinement
From Torrent Freak comes news that one of the Pirate Bay founders is now being held in solitary confinement after Sweden turned him over to Denmark. From the article: "In a recent letter sent to Amnesty and shared with TorrentFreak, Gottfrid’s mother Kristina explains her son’s plight. She says that Gottfrid is being kept in solitary and treated as if he were a 'dangerous, violent and aggressive criminal' even though his only crime — if any — is hacking. Gottfrid’s lawyer Luise Høi says the terms of his confinement are unacceptable and are being executed without the correct legal process. 'It is the case that Danish authorities are holding my client in solitary confinement without a warrant,' Høi explains, noting that if the authorities wish to exclude Gottfrid from access to anyone except his lawyer and prison staff, they need to apply for a special order."
I don't know about other countries rules or law but when your sent in Solitary Confinement its usually because of your attitude or certain actions that are done in present... not related to your crime that was judged in a court of law
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Hackers like this are able to launch missiles with just a pay phone. Keeping him in the general population would be suicidal.
Solitary confinement in a Danish prison - doesn't that just mean he gets the jacuzzi all to himself?
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He should have blown up the world's economy, using criminal fraud. No criminal prosecution, or even investigation, despite enormous harm to millions and likely criminal action. Evil hackers? Give 'em solitary for life.
Where they might, um, not put him in solitary.
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What is it with the Nordic countries always willing to be Americas proxy in these copyright/leak cases? Its very sad.
And why are piracy cases being pursued like they were terrorism cases? Nordic countries are more like Gitmo than real nations, willing to whore themselves rather than have backbone. Thor would not approve.
Dangerous: Violent:: "your son violently thrust production executives and C-levels into a state of abject povery by freely distributing material from poor artists who hadnt the chance to sign up with a label. As a result these suffering destitute former billionaires are reduced to driving a mercedes and eating domestic caviar."
Aggressive: "Your son aggressively refused to roll over and die when we attacked and litigated his userbase, his family, his friends and his civil rights. He was incomprehensively aggressive in opposing our bribery and extortion of his regional and local government officials in our pursuit of the definition of truth and justice"
so you see ma'am, hes clearly a threat
--MPAA
"what he said but hes also a terrorist and he killed two cats that were about to make the kids laugh out loud."
--RIAA
Good people go to bed earlier.
I really wish you kids would stop discovering Mitnick and worshiping him like a hero.
Lets get some facts about Mitnick straight.
He wasn't a fucking hacker, he was a socially inept douche back who actually was capable of lying his way into accounts of people who didn't know that giving your password out to some random guy that calls you is a bad idea.
Nothing he did was even a little bit impressive. Ever. Again, let me repeat since it might not have been clear: NOTHING HE EVER DID WAS EVEN A LITTLE BIT IMPRESSIVE.
Well ... except for one thing: His ego that happened to be the size of Africa. Mitnick was made an example because he is an ignorant arrogant prick who kept acting like he was a bad ass even thought the cops and lawyers were frying his ass for doing it, so they just made it as unbelievably bad on him as they could.
If you knew anything about the ACTUAL history of hacking and not what you read because some old dude told you about this guy that was 'the first hacker' as far as the american public was concerned ... you'd know he wasn't the first. He wasn't any good. And people with far better talent than him also went to jail for long periods of time. The only difference is that Mitnick's ego made him talk and act like he was a bad ass ...
Other guys, the ones who ACTUALLY did shit, you didn't hear about, neither before or after they got caught (for those who did get caught).
So anyway, back to my point. When you young'ens pull out the Mitnick name, its makes us old guys realize you're an ignorant cluebie who's name dropping trying to impress us with your knowledge of Internet lore ... We instantly see through you and that you're a fake douche trying to pretend you're something you're not.
Mitnick was a fucking douche, learn the real history and stop treading on his name. It'll be far less embarrassing for you.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Hacking, copyright infringement... either way, he is a non-violent offender. So why the solitary?
Idealists like to see the justice system as a center for protecting the public safety and rehabilitating offenders. More often, it's used to satisfy the public's sadistic desire to see suffering and ruin inflicted upon those who wrong them.
+1 - Since I have no points :(
Social Engineering isn't hacking... Fortune Tellers and Used Car Salesmen have been doing it for years before networked computers were created...
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
NOTHING HE EVER DID WAS EVEN A LITTLE BIT IMPRESSIVE.
His social engineering skills were impressive.
Sorry about being on you lawn.
It doesn't matter if what he did was impressive at all. The point remains: He did a few things, scared a few people, and was sentenced heavily as a public example, aided by prosecutors who were only too happy to outright lie about the threat he posed to add to the punishment. He may have been just douchebag who succeeded by persistence and luck rather than actual skill, but he was still sentenced and punished as if he were a super-hacker capable of bringing the world to its knees with a phone call.
The objective of prosecutors is to either reach a plea agreement that makes them look good, or to get the harshest sentence they possibly can. They will fight dirty to achieve that, and they can be very good at doing so. In their skillful manipulation of the narrative, a script kiddie who needs a good telling off can turn into a terrorist who caused millions of dollars in damages. Any hope of rehabilitation is thrown out the window.
You're already modded troll. Nobody likes to hear that their beloved Pirate Bay isn't an excuse by entitled people to make money serving ads while they facilitate other entitled people's desire to not pay for the works of others.
...Is anyone out there in Denmark doing anything to protest this? I know that the Danes are not to be fucked with when it comes to crimes against humanity, but I wonder how much this matters to the general population. Sadly I suspect 'not much'. Solitary confinement is torture. Torture for a crime with no victim is out of line, and sends a message the someone is in a place of power that shouldn't be.
It might sound silly, but if you're not in Denmark, you can keep this guy in your thoughts. Picture him with a smile, and embrace him internally. It's all that we can do. If you're in Denmark, then protest this torture in whatever way you see fit.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
I know many people on this site are going to start flapping their jaws (err, fingers) about how subjecting someone to such deplorable conditions for a nonviolent offense is unjust, but most of you don't understand how the prison system works. In the prison system, there is a hierarchy of criminals that control the behavior of all of the other inmates and hackers are always at the top of that hierarchy. As soon as a hacker gets sent to prison, he immediately finds out who is in charge and beats that person within an inch of their life. At that point, the hacker has earned his place at the top. In order to maintain this position, he must rule with an iron fist and beat people on a regular basis just to send a message that anyone that challenges him will end up nearly dead. The hacker is easily the most dangerous person in prison and the warden is simply keeping his prisoners safe by keeping this guy in solitary confinement. It has nothing to do with this particular hacker making some powerful people look bad and possibly marginally reducing the profits of some corporations via his web site, it's about safety.
A fact that many foreigners may not be aware of, is that Finns also hate Swedes, but I guess it's more in a humoristic way. Swedes are often viewed as faggots, douchebags, stuff like that. Also cheering Sweden in sports competitions is perceived lame. Of course Finland does not actually hate Sweden.
It is probably because the slavic tradition of Finland conflicts with the more cheerful scandinavian atmosphere of Sweden.
OK, let me guess, you went to school with Mitnick and he used to bully your ass, am I right?
You got issues bro...
I've always been in the opinion that anyone who serves as a figure of authority (this includes government officials) and uses that authority to commit a crime should receive a minimum of double the maximum sentence of that crime in the same manner than you get double the fine for speeding in a work zone.
If they commit a crime that is punishable by 5-7 years in prison using their given authority, then they should get a minimum of 14 years in prison period. No less.
Of course, to get this double sentence, they have to be using their authority to commit the crime. They should also be removed from service and ban from ever working for the public in any form again. (which includes a private sector job that is doing government contract work)
Abuse of power should have absolute ZERO tolerance.
In this case, I believe putting someone in solitary confinement without a valid reason is abuse of power. Whoever made this decision should be removed from power and should have to serve twice as many days in solitary confinement as Gottfrid has.
How about knowing how to change the phone tables so it looked like the call that was doing this was coming from someone else's house. They would know that someone was hacking, they could trace it back, but the trace would lead to the wrong house. Probably one of the reason he was so well known. If you can hack and no one knows it, you might not get famous.
I really wish you kids would stop discovering Mitnick and worshiping him like a hero.
Lets get some facts about Mitnick straight.
You would do well to follow your own advice.
Nobody here is idolizing him, we are merely pointing out that he is perhaps the best example of a geek being punished out of all proportion to their actual criminality, and deliberately hounded by prosecutors and law officials who were behaving no better than the lowest sort of playground bully.
That's all; the fact we keep mentioning him is not because we think he was a uberhacker; quite the reverse. The people bullying him were the ones claiming that.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
He fucking hacked fucking phone systems. Which makes fucking makes him a fucking hacker. Fuckity fuckity fuckity fuuuuck!
Everybody makes fun of their neighbors. As a New Yorker I'm required to make fun of New Jersey. Americans make fun of Canadians. Germans make fun of Austrians. People on the other side of the planet? Who cares.
Of course he's dangerous, he embarrassed someone with power.
No, I think it's more complex than that. Mitnick is a narcissist. He's actually a pretty successful one, as shown by the fact that we're discussing him in this thread. Him being mentioned in an otherwise interesting discussion turns it into a fanboy thread. And while that might not bother everybody, it dumbs down the discussion.
You're thinking of worgen, not a warg. And he probably just has the market cornered on netherweave cloth on his server and won't stop undercutting the other tailors on netherweave bag prices.
They should definitely throw the book at him. Or at a minimum isolate him from being able to purchase Rune Thread.
It is probably because the slavic tradition of Finland conflicts with the more cheerful scandinavian atmosphere of Sweden.
600 years of Swedish rule over Finland might not have anything to do with it?
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Everybody makes fun of their neighbors. As a New Yorker I'm required to make fun of New Jersey. Americans make fun of Canadians. Germans make fun of Austrians. People on the other side of the planet? Who cares.
But the interesting thing here is that Swedes do not have a similar "hate" relationship to Finland.
there is a really good webcomic: http://satwcomic.com/ that gets into the cultural differences between the Nordics while poking a little bit of fun at them (and the rest of the world)
It also namedrops hetalia and some other good graphics/comics
-I'm just sayin'
Actually, that's the point. He certainly wasn't an uber hacker. He was closer to a con man except that it was mostly to satisfy his own curiosity and he did little ACTUAL damage. In spite of that, he was treated as extremely dangerous and his potential damage was inflated several orders of magnitude and treated as if it was actual. Meanwhile, con-men who cheat the elderly out of their retirement run free.
That must really get under the Finn's skin.
Fun to compare someone who hasn't been found guilty of a crime to War Criminal Albert Speer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Speer
Speer served 20 years and was given more freedom in his confinement then Gottfrid, who has not been found guilty by Sweden.
From wiki: "With the draft memoir complete and clandestinely transmitted, Speer sought a new project. He found one while taking his daily exercise, walking in circles around the prison yard. Measuring the path's distance carefully, Speer set out to walk the distance from Berlin to Heidelberg. He then expanded his idea into a worldwide journey, visualizing the places he was "traveling" through while walking the path around the prison yard. Speer ordered guidebooks and other materials about the nations through which he imagined he was passing, so as to envisage as accurate a picture as possible.[117] Meticulously calculating every meter traveled, and mapping distances to the real-world geography, he began in northern Germany, passed through Asia by a southern route before entering Siberia, then crossed the Bering Strait and continued southwards, finally ending his sentence 35 kilometres (22 mi) south of Guadalajara, Mexico."
You don't seem to get it. Having rights in the legal system is not reserved for über hackers. It's there for everyone, not even for, but especially for douchebags like Mitnick. That they put him in solitary confinement, him being not a good hacker at all, is the prime example of un-ethical behavior of authorities in the US judical system. (But then, this is a barbaric system with death sentences. So it's part of the system, FWIW.)
Not that this is really different in other parts of the world, as we can read in TFA.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
chopping idiots up with an axe is also 'hacking people' but would you consider an axe-murderer a hacker also?
I really wish you kids would stop discovering Mitnick and worshiping him like a hero.
Lets get some facts about Mitnick straight.
He wasn't a fucking hacker, he was a socially inept douche back who actually was capable of lying his way into accounts of people who didn't know that giving your password out to some random guy that calls you is a bad idea.
Nothing he did was even a little bit impressive. Ever. Again, let me repeat since it might not have been clear: NOTHING HE EVER DID WAS EVEN A LITTLE BIT IMPRESSIVE.
I'm certainly not impressed... by your comment and your complete lack of knowledge concerning the subject you're commenting on.
First of all: Social Engineering is most certainly part of what professionals are calling hacking. It was never just about wardialing and guessing passwords. In the movie "wargames" the lead character does some guessing and goes to the library to figure out that many passwords are weak and that people often use named of family member as password, thus "Joshua". Today, in real life, much of this is done using social engineering. You can get very far just calling people connected with your target or one of it's suppliers (enter 'dumpster diving' which will tell you quite a bit 'innocent' information about someone). Using name dropping and a bit of charm-based persuation you can get just about everything you want. Kevin Mitnick made this an art and wrote the book on it, "The Art of Deception".
Among the stuff he gained full access to was manufactorers of IT-infrastructure, defense sub-contractors etc. - it is not known what he did with all this (the Motorola hack is possibly the most well known) so the NSA is still watching him close to this day. He did modify firmware code to allow himself administrative access and he could "whistle into a phone" to get free long distance etc. - although no actual whistling was involved. He just punched a string of numbers and sent it to the exchange, which activated those hidden features. There was also a code which turned a cell phone into a bug. The phone and the exchange has to be Motorola but if they were, the phone would transmit audio while appearing to be idle. He didn't create this functionality - he just found it and learned how to activate it.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
well, i guess he shouldnt have blown up the twin towers then ... tsk , STILL in solitary ? how long has that been ?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?