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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."
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?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
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.
In Scandinavia it's a common pre-court procedure to deny the suspect of news and other means to by which they might influence or be influenced by the world outside.
And no, Amnesty does not like it.
In the real world, solitary confinement is often used as extrajudicial punishment by unaccountable authorities.
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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.
This really depends on WHERE you are talking about in the USA. There are plenty of cases where the police and the jail system are used as arms of the corporate class.
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.
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This really depends on WHERE you are talking about in the USA.
I was thinking about the part that consists of 50 states and a few territories. I was about to say that at least we don't throw them into pre-trial solitary, but then I remembered Kevin Mitnick.
Mitnick served five years in prison — four and a half years pre-trial and eight months in solitary confinement — because, according to Mitnick, law enforcement officials convinced a judge that he had the ability to "start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone"
I think that in almost all of the US law enforcement has been corrupted into a posture of resisting change and sustaining the status quo at any cost. Beggars on the sidewalks are bad for business and therefore get arrested. Chronic drunks and the mentally ill are also unpleasant and dampen business and therefore get arrested. Wives feel threatened by prostitution and therefore prostitutes get arrested. And it gets worse. Laws may regulate what you can grow for food in your front yard and even in your backyard. Style of clothing can also get you arrested easily. The young folks that like to have their underwear sticking out of the back of their jeans often find out about that. In some suburbs even the paint on your home is subject to approval in advance by the city. The line between perpetuating a certain view of what the city should look like and enforcement of what all people call crime no longer exists. Palm Beach,Florida makes it illegal to feed the poor. Would you believe that? It is a theory similar to laws about feeding the pigeons. The city feels that is the poor are fed it will attract more poor people. And the same county has made it illegal to beg or even hold a sign asking for help.
California makes a lot of use of 'not solitary confinement' as a way to combat prison gangs.
It involves prisoners being kept in single cell for 20 hours a day, with four hours allowed for exercise in a small yard and no communication permitted with other prisoners. Entertainment is not provided. Even books are not permitted, and these conditions can continue for years at the discretion of the head warden. Note that this is not legally solitary confinement, because *that* could be legally considered a form of torture if conducted for so long. Legally, it's simply a means to isolate suspected members of prison gangs.
In much the same way that certain other branches of the US government decided that waking inmates up every hour to verify they are not dead is only a means of preventing suicide, and not intentional sleep deprivation. Because that would be torture.
There's very little outrage about the California situation, because there is very little public sympathy for prisoners, and politicians fear being attacked by their opponents as 'soft on crime.'
+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.
Or suspected (but innocent) gangbanger. Or someone that the authorities don't like but conveniently label as a gangbanger in order to torture. I mean it's not as if authorities would ever be so petty as to apply such punishments to petty crimes like, oh I don't know, (alleged) copyright infringement is it?
But hey, if you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear, right?
Fuck you, you jackbooted apologist.
Or insulting guard. Or protesting against other ill-treatment. Or being targeted by another prisoner looking to start a fight. There's no judicial oversight or accountability involved, as the prisoner is, well, a prisoner. A warden simply announces 'that guy is a troublemaker, throw him into the isolation cell.'
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.
While entirely true that The Great Escape was not a documentary, it was based on a non-fiction book of the same name by Paul Brickhill, who was in fact involved as a POW in the very real Great Escape, though due to claustrophobia he did not participate in the actual tunneling or the escape itself.
The characters in the film were based on real men and composites of real men. The character "Cooler King" Virgil Hilts, played by Steve McQueen, whom we see sent to solitary multiple times, was based on David M. Jones, who participated in the Doolittle Raid, survived same and escaped captivity at that time, only to be shot down in North Africa and sent to the very real Stalag Luft III. He actually led the digging team on the real tunnel "Harry".
On balance I believe The Great Escape is about the closest thing to an accurate depiction of such an arresting historic episode as you can get in a dramatic film.
How about when they asked mentally challenged people to help them run a sting operation and then charge them with the crimes they asked them to commit? ATF uses rogue tactics in storefront stings across nation.
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.
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
I was kept in solitary for >36 hours (without the "hour out") after being pulled over for failure to appear resulting from an argument over proof of auto insurance. (I _had_ the insurance, but one has to appear and say that.) They cleaned out my pockets when they arrested me and wanted me to sign an inventory of what they took, and stuff was missing from their inventory, so I refused to sign it. As retaliation for this, they put me in solitary, and told the people trying to bail me out that they couldn't because I was being "uncooperative" (at which point, I know half of slashdot will latch on, "well, the word is true, so whatever they did is justified." STFU.) Three guards shifts changed, and I would call the guy over, and say "What's going on," and he just says, "They'll come get ya when they're ready." Nobody seemed to know why I was there, or care. The first guy presumably fucked up the paperwork so I would just rot in there.
I do not know if county jails were always like this, but these guys are stupid disgusting little fascists. Specific rights and sane treatment for prisoners and suspected criminals are a core part of the founding of this country, or so we were taught in patriotic indoctrination in elementary school, but when I look around me at my fellow citizens I see a bunch of screaming blithering autistic jack-booted little proto-thugs who, like you said, reserve their outrage for petty little sophist class wars over busses or "animal rights" or some other bullshit, and get all slippery when it comes to torture. I don't want to discuss what Warg did. I get it---he's being punished for making them feel stupid, somehow, or for not behaving as though his spirit is broken. These sick fucks... I want out of the US, and it's really scary to see this stuff happening elsewhere though a relief there appears to be some kind of procedural relief and social consensus against it, both of which are missing here.
I was not woken up every hour. I was kept there for 1.5 days, not years. And still, my reaction is, fuck you, fuck you all. I do not want children in this place. I can never relax here. I do not respect my neighbors who consent to this.
You are sitting in the park. You are in a hurry and not all that hungry so you give half of your ham sandwich to a homeless person and go back to the office. The city claims you have broken the law. No reasonable person would believe that you were operating a restaurant.
Of course he's dangerous, he embarrassed someone with power.
How is not having books any form of... I'm at a loss for words... not being torture ? Not being a form of punishement ? I mean many people would be OK left alone with a book. But left alone with the only option being watching already dry paint get drier ? How does that improve them as human being in any way ? It would turn anybody into a raving lunatic. I swear, people who run US prisons should be the first ones locked up in them.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
No, I do not believe it. I believe that you just made it up. Do you have a citation? Because a Google search finds nothing except a law banning "aggressive begging" (blocking traffic, badgering or pursuing people, loitering next to ATMs, etc.).
I wouldn't go so far as to accuse him of just making it up. There are several places he might have picked up the idea. Some, the courts overrule the laws or parts of it. Some are just proposed. Some require a permit to 'gather' (eg more than 5 people). On Thanksgiving, the church should have 1 person with food in the park. 4 at a time, the homeless could come over. Then, walk away and 4 more could come up. I think the homeless should not be able to look at each other either ;) Get a permit right? I believe in the Orlando case, the problem was, you can only get a permit twice a year for each park so you have to move around. Are the activist intentionally getting in trouble making their point? Sure. Does feeding the poor in the same park, week after week, putting wear and tear on the park? Sure.
Orlando, FL
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Solitary cells, and prison cells in general, are usually constructed to minimise any form of stimulation. Uniform grey walls, undecorated. Grey bedding on grey beds. Nothing that can be picked up or moved.
The root of the issue is that a large chunk of society really struggle with the idea of 'rehabilitation.' Instead they can only see the justice system as a deterrant - in their view, prisoners need to be made to suffer as much as possible, because the threat of this suffering is what stops other people from breaking the law. Modern decency stops them from openly advocating for torture, but they don't feel much like protesting against it either. Any attempt to improve education for prisoners or provide them with help back into the workforce or support after their release is just regarded as a 'weakness,' lessening the terror that prison is supposed to inspire in those contemplating crime.
So we end up with an industrial system for taking people who commit minor offenses, destroying them socially, destroying their education, ruining them financially, making them all but unemployable... and then we wonder why they turn to serious crime once they get out.
Waking a prisoner every hour to make certain that he is not dead is torture pure and simple. It makes no difference at all whether a prisoner has passed away and it will be obvious at the morning head count anyway. The body will not decompose in the few hours between meals. Keeping books, and radio and television away from inmates is also torture. It is obviously designed to induce mental illness and inmates should be able to sue over such barbaric actions. God forbid an inmate should read a book when he can not sleep thus improving himself. And i have to wonder at how stupid authorities can be, Do they expect that a convict will behave well after such treatment or upon release will the be putting a man full of abuse, rage and depression on the streets? I know if I were treated like that I would want to kill people and I might not even care which person I killed, harmed or whatever.
Same country. Same mentality. Whatever the fruit the harvest is the same.
For two reasons:
1) Why should you need a permission to give away your stuff? Requiring a permit for an action is pure authoritarianism. It might be a lesser evil in some cases - for example, hunting licenses to keep an animal population from collapsing - but it's an evil nonetheless, and should only be used if grave consequences force the hand. And no, "I feel uncomfortable seeing poor people" is not a grave consequence.
2) This particular permit is specifically aimed against poor people, and as such will cotribute the economic and moral decay caused by pretending poverty and prosperity are earned by vice and virtue respectively. It's our good old friend the Just World Fallacy doing its usual disgusting work, by both reassuring you that you are quite safe (since you're moral) and that the victims don't deserve a single cent of your help. Unfortunately, a fallacy is endangered by exposure to reality, thus the need ot keep the realities of poverty out of sight. So, this particular permit exists to help reinforce a particularly evil and self-destructive form of self-delusion.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Which doesn't make it illegal to feed the poor, that just means you need a permit to do so. As long as those permits aren't ridiculous then why is that a problem? Silly sure...
I need a permit to drive on a public road, does that mean it is illegal to drive?
What if they would only issue you a one-day driving permit a maximum of twice a year?
See the problem now?
The government doesn't want private citizens, churches, or other non-government-affiliated/controlled independent charitable organizations to come forward to help the poor.
They insist that the poor effectively become wards of the State by being forced to sign up for government-approved programs for help instead of receiving help from those in their communities outside of any government-run/sponsored/funded programs.
Gotta keep their folded faces to the floor.
The milk of human kindness is a Schedule-1 illegal substance in the USSA.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.