What is strange with that? This setup are quite common in Civil law[0]. I believe it roughly works the same way at least in the other Scandinavian countries and Germany to.
They're lay people and tend to follow the professional judge. They are often times more biased than professional judges when it comes to high-morals (I have no data supporting this claim, but remember that these people want to judge). There's two levels of indirection from the people (they are elected by elected politicians).
I don't like it. The law is immutable in a trial and should be interpreted by a professional judge. The control mechanism preventing the judge from unfair interpretation should not be amateur, social conservative, middle age men participating in police interest groups on their spare time ("jäv", happened more than once)
I did a quick search for jav but none of the results were titled "introduction to jav for americans." Can you explain jav? Is jav the police interest groups?
Police interest group sounds like a a group of tommy tactical types that wear cargo pants, and spend a lot of their time at the range or talking about what they EDC.
I believe that a German municipal council and a Swedish municipal assembly is basicly the same, and both are staffed with elected officials ( aka "politicians").
It's complicated in Germany, I don't know about Sweden.
In Germany a list of lay judges is generated. Either by random, by committees, churches, unions etc. This is not defined. Then the municipal assembly takes this list and filters those of the list that should not become lay judges. The list goes to the court and the court then votes with a committee the lay judges (two third majority).
It might be subject to discussion, to me this is not identical to "Appointed by politicians".
I strongly prefer common to civil law, which makes the "find a place in the world with the most freedom" challenge harder (it pretty much limits to ex-British colonies, which win on common law, but are also closely affiliated with the US and thus don't work as well as a hedge against the US military-industrial-intelligence complex.)
I feel sorry for the lawyers that live on the border of LA and need to be proficient in their state's laws as well as LA's. Bar prep must have been awful.
Correct -- although louisiana is awesome for counterexamples to all sorts of legal assertions about the USA. I also pretty much stick to the 9th circuit states :)
I don't understand, why would he hack a company with tax info? I really cannot think of one good reason. Did he make any public statements about it? Did he do it from his apartment in Cambodia? Why does his apartment in Cambodia enter the story? I am perplexed.
He has not confessed so there is no explanation from his part.
I read the police investigation (it has been "leaked" to WikiLeaks but it is actually official)
Some of the evidence:
The IRC nick "tLt" brags about the intrusion.
Svartholm acknowledges that he has used this nick in the past but not to make these statements.
However, in conversations where the bragging has been done, other chat participants have asked something like "Anakata: Are you still in Cambodia" and tLt answers the question.
There are files on his computers that originated on the intruded computers.
There are files on the intruded computers that originates on his computers (build artifacts etc).
Svartholm acknowledges that his computer must have been used for the intrusion, but that he did not do it. He says that Remote Desktop or Powershell Server must have been used. However, forensic investigations of Windows logs etc show that no one has ever logged in with these services since the OS was installed.
One / some of the intrusions have by using the login credentials of Monique Wadsted, lawyer supporting the prosecution in the Pirate Bay trial.
He leaked (or someone else with access) some 10k personal identification numbers of people with hidden identities (cops, domestic abuse victims etc).
As far as I can remember form the investigation protocol, he hacked the company/ies when he was in Cambodia. He used one of his computers there if memory serves. He also talked on IRC about the hack when connecting from Cambodia if I recall correctly.
My memory is a bit hazy on where the logs were found, but I think it was on an encrypted partition on one of his computers, IRC logs and putty logs. Or something along those lines. The putty logs matched the connection logs from the hack.
The investigation protocol was 'leaked' on Wikileaks in the begin of the trial. It is in Swedish but the logs are, imo, pretty convincing, suggesting that he was the one/one of the people behind the hack.
This will with all likelihood get appealed to a higher instance.
If I recall that wasn't clear. The IRC logs were quite the jumbled mess of Meth and hacking discussion. "For the lulz" though I don't believe they used that term.
I do encourage you to check out the investigation protocol, even though most of it is in Swedish, the investigation is very extensive, surprisingly so. It puts the Swedish IT investigators in a very good light, from my amateur perspective.
Thank you for the explanation. I'll take a look, but if what you're saying is right then we probably shouldn't consider this case in the context of The Pirate Bay. Being a member of The Pirate Bay team doesn't grant him immunity from any future misdeeds.
As far as I can tell the only connection to the TPB trial is that he used the credentials of one of the lawyers involved in TPB case. Mongols comment from earlier in the thread (read it as well! Contains more info):
>One / some of the intrusions have by using the login credentials of Monique Wadsted, lawyer supporting the prosecution in the Pirate Bay trial.
I was about to say "this puts the Swedish IT investigators in a very good light." Maybe that's what made me so skeptical in the first place. Thanks for answering my questions. :)
>>>The investigation protocol was 'leaked' on Wikileaks in the begin of the trial. It is in Swedish but the logs are, imo, pretty convincing, suggesting that he was the one/one of the people behind the hack.
Agreed on this point. When you consider he was a major meth addict at the time, being careful isn't something you consider when you're in a drug induced haze.
Not sure how jails in Sweden work, but why appeal it? He could probably be out in 18 months or less with good behavior.
I'm not very surprised by this. If someone is accused and sentenced for a crime they honest and truly don't believe they committed, people get very jaded against the government.
This is why a large group of people pointed out that if you declare 2/3 of the population as criminals, the effect is very bad for society. It doesn't really matter if you are pro- file-sharing, or anti-piracy. If we loose the mutual respect between citizens and law creating government, everyone will loose.
Thank you. If I could give you more up votes, I would.
Reading through it, I find some clear difference between what is actually said in media/commenters, and what the police actually found. For example, the 10k records was not a list of people with hidden identity. it was a record of 10k people where some had hidden identity.
As an interesting side note... They have quite few bad spelling errors. I particularly like the "postskanningar" that they found.
He was found guilty of hacking and spreading personal information. It has nothing to do with TPB case. He hacked into Logica and later leaked protected personal information.
After the PRISM scandal I thought HN would be happy that people who steals and publishes (and possibly uses, though that is not proven in any way) personal information gets put behind bars.
Or are you suggesting that leaking personal identification numbers (that are secret/hidden) of cops, domestic abuse victims etc. is a good thing?
However, once you've read a few threads on anything TPB related (though this one is rather tame), it is striking how extremely paranoid comments are. Everything is somehow politically motivated and instigated by USA/MPAA. I am simply very fed up with anakata getting a free pass from people just because he founded TPB and got sued by MPAA and friends.
I don't think people who hacks into government databases and leaks secret information, that could put people at risk, should get any praise. Regardless of past achievements. Nor was there anything substantial evidence that this was a political trial nor that it was related to copyright infringement.
I can empathize. Just keep in mind that such comments make it actively more difficult for others to understand your opinion, and the physical act of typing them out makes it more difficult for you to think dispassionately.
As an aside: I honestly don't think caycep's question was supportive of anakata. I can see how you could interpret it that way, but it can also just be an empirical question. Heck, caycep compared anakata to Al Capone, and nobody would argue that Capone's tax evasion was acceptable.
