clearly a lab computer!

September 21, 2014 11:40 AM

Sentenced in a Swedish court, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg gets extradited to Denmark to stand trial for another case of system intrusion.

Mefi's Own, Jacob Applebaum has some choice words after his testimony in the Danish court.

the Swedish security services conducted the initial technical forensics(pdf), focusing on whether or nor the Windows Firewall was present (as opposed to enabled), yet when the Danish Police conducted their own forensic analysis, they found over 500 trojans installed, a fact to which the presiding judge replied "I don't know about Trojans"

aside from the Swedish security services inability to perform a trivial virus-scan & a post-swartholm-extradition financial aid from Sweden to Cambodia of $33 553 944 (2011 - $25 445 074). but there's also an observation of skewed data after the swedish trial.


although Gottfrid, has gone on the record as to who did what and when on said lab-device, the Danish police has yet to investigate.


The company Gottfrid stands accused of hacking also has an interesting background pertaining to a certain country's clandestine services.

This trial has everything, even alleged coercion of witnesses!

obligatory wikileaks link of documents relating to the alleged cambodian extradition corruption charge levelled by the defense.

posted by xcasex (25 comments total)

That's a novel theory of Applebaum's, that the prosecution should know something about computers and networks, in this kind of case. Innovative thinking.
posted by thelonius at 11:57 AM on September 21, 2014 [4 favorites]

My favorite is the DA's collusion of ioerrors solidarity tweet about anakata proving a friendship.
But i'm with peter sunde on this one, gottfrid cant even configure a linux firewall without a howto, much less hack a system.

but then again, there's also this tidbit (showing how archive.org indexed the very same servers he allegedly hacked)
Logica/CSC should be on trial here as well.
posted by xcasex at 12:32 PM on September 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

So, was there ever any more reporting about the whole neo-nazi connection? Because that honestly soured me quite a bit on the whole idea of the TPB guys as some kind of modern freedom fighters.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 1:22 PM on September 21, 2014

Some brief background would be good here, a quick Google search isn't turning it up. What was Gottfrid (allegedly?) trying to accomplish?
posted by eugenen at 1:33 PM on September 21, 2014 [5 favorites]

That's the thing, not even the swedish prosecutor could elaborate on that. Mostly he was drunk and High in his apartment in Cambodia.

There are however some summaries on qnrq.se relating to both the swedish and Danish cases
posted by xcasex at 1:48 PM on September 21, 2014

If this guy tried to break into computer systems it is a crime.
posted by Ironmouth at 2:09 PM on September 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

Has the U.S. requested his extradition, given that his alleged crimes were against US rightsholders?
posted by acb at 2:35 PM on September 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

If this guy tried to break into computer systems it is a crime.


I agree, however. He was acquitted in sweden of the case he's yet again being tried for. The Danish case is being run by the mothercorp. It's all very convoluted. But it seems his real crime was cofounding tpb.
posted by xcasex at 3:03 PM on September 21, 2014 [1 favorite]

Ironmouth: While that may be true, there are allegations of government corruption and coercion of witnesses (does that count as witness tampering?).

So yes, I may be guilty of speeding if caught speeding; but getting beat up by the cop after getting pulled over and then having the cop shoot my dog should be the things we are talking about, not my speeding.
posted by el io at 3:42 PM on September 21, 2014 [4 favorites]

I am confused. I thought Gottfrid was a fairly solid hacker / programmer / system admin who setup and wrote some of the major components of The Pirate Bay?
posted by humanfont at 4:00 PM on September 21, 2014

After some catch up reading here is my understanding of the case. Gottfrid was one of the founders of The Pirate Bay. His involvement in that site lead to criminal charges related to copyright. To escape those charges he fled to Cambodia which has no extradition with Sweeden (where he faced charges). It is alleged thst while in Cambodia he made a living doing various comouter work much of it alleged to involving cracking and hacking. It is alleged that he developed a serious drug habbit and became isolated and in debt to his dealer. Allegedly he and a 21 year old accompliss broke into Denmark's motor vehicle database and stole social security numbers and other personal data that could be sold to identity theives. Presented with allegations that be was a dangerous cybercriminal the Cambodian government deported hin to Sweeden. He was charged with criminal copyright violations and sentenced to prison. He was then charged with an acquited of hacking in Sweeden. He was then sent to Denmark where he faces more hacking charges.

His defense is that the computer found in his posession while in Cambodia was configured to allow hacker friends to use it remotely. Gottfrid claims that one of these other people committed the crime. Anyone with access could have commited the crime. Even if it can be proven that the computer was used in a hack, it cant be proven that he was the one doing it. His defense also casts doubt on the existence of any actual hack as the computer records of the hack are shoddy. It is suggested that the hacking allegations were just invented to pressure the Cambodian government. These allegations are now used to justify holding him in prison longer because various international governments have been unable to shut The Pirate Bay down.
posted by humanfont at 4:59 PM on September 21, 2014 [6 favorites]

If his defense is right, he has some particularly shitty friends. I mean the hackers could have used any random node to conduct attacks from and they chose to route through his computer in such a way to leave a forensic trail for the final investigators (ie: directly attacked the targets from his machine?).
posted by el io at 9:23 PM on September 21, 2014

His defense also casts doubt on the existence of any actual hack as the computer records of the hack are shoddy. It is suggested that the hacking allegations were just invented to pressure the Cambodian government.

So his defense is that the hacking charges are made up, and anyway some other people did it? Doesn't inspire much confidence, not that I'd put it past his accusers to harrass him this way.
posted by Dr Dracator at 11:02 PM on September 21, 2014

A better way to phrase it might be that "the prosecution cannot prove that I committed this crime; furthermore, they cannot prove that the crime actually occurred".
posted by Mars Saxman at 12:45 AM on September 22, 2014 [5 favorites]

So his defense is that the hacking charges are made up, and anyway some other people did it? Doesn't inspire much confidence, not that I'd put it past his accusers to harrass him this way.


He named the people that had access to the device, the police haven't investigated, on top of this, they're using an empty router casing as evidence along with the device (that the swedish police havent done a thorough forensic analysis of before handing it over to the danish police so there's also a question of tampering.)

and on top of that, automated tools indexed the sekrit servers, so i'm not sure about the culpability here, seems to much like a stitch-up. if there is a guilty party it's the sysadmin.
posted by xcasex at 4:47 AM on September 22, 2014

I am confused. I thought Gottfrid was a fairly solid hacker / programmer / system admin who setup and wrote some of the major components of The Pirate Bay?


he's a hack alright ;)
programmer, as far as anyone with access to tutorials. sysadmin? well not more than your generic gentoo/LFS linux-user.
posted by xcasex at 4:50 AM on September 22, 2014

According to his defense he has placed himself in danger of being a rat or snitch by giving police the names of the individuals with access to the system. Those names are. eraser, ripley, nohyp, and rbi.

Suspect: You got the wrong guy I swear. My friends took my car for that bank job.
Police: Ok what are their names.
Suspect: ok but I you gotta protect me, these boys think I've ratted on then they will come down hard. It was either John, Ringo, George or Paul. If I tell you anymore I'm a dead man....
posted by humanfont at 7:32 AM on September 22, 2014

I thought Gottfrid was a fairly solid hacker / programmer / system admin who setup and wrote some of the major components of The Pirate Bay?

I don't know anything about this particular guy's skills, but you wouldn't need to be especially competent to write TPB - just look at the shoddy pile of junk that sat behind MtGox... PHP makes it relatively easy to put together a website that appears to be perfectly functional, but that says nothing about how well architected/engineered it is...
posted by russm at 7:09 PM on September 22, 2014

> you wouldn't need to be especially competent to write TPB - just look at the shoddy pile of junk that sat behind MtGox... PHP makes it relatively easy to put together a website that appears to be perfectly functional, but that says nothing about how well architected/engineered it is...

I'm going to respectfully disagree with this. While you're correct that it doesn't take a genius to write the original search engine, keeping it running is an entirely different matter. The problem with running a torrent search engine is you get hacked and DDoS'd and no one important really cares. Additionally, especially with torrent sites, you have multiple multi billion dollar industries that are very interested in you not being open. Renting a pretty large DDoS can be done for not a lot of money, and TPB effectively has no legal recourse against one. Basically you have a bunch of people with a lot of money vs some dudes with no money on the internet.

I don't know anything about this particular dudes bonafides, but to write the people who are responsible for TPB still being up as hacks or skiddies I think is to underestimate them.
posted by yeahwhatever at 9:27 PM on September 22, 2014

Not only did the prosecution not understand what trojans were, that installed software on the computer they were doing forensics on.

Boggling.
posted by anemone of the state at 12:24 AM on September 24, 2014 [1 favorite]

and apparently, the exact copy the swedish police handed over to the danish police.. was modified!

which, kinda, well.. my point is thus, this is yet another political trial.

and apparently CSC "donated" 2.000.000 DKK to the police....
posted by xcasex at 7:06 PM on September 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

Laura Poitras’s Snowden film “Citizenfour” to open DOK Leipzig 2014
posted by jeffburdges at 1:44 PM on September 25, 2014

Petition to Obama Administration: End the Harassment and Targeting of Reporters
posted by jeffburdges at 3:31 PM on September 25, 2014 [1 favorite]

Very clearly a political prisoner, irregardless of any hacking, like ioerror said. Also, very poor evidence trail, like ioerror said. And there is obviously rampant corruption between the Danish police and Logica/CSC.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:00 PM on September 25, 2014 [1 favorite]

Jacob Appelbaum IUF talk ‘Be the next Snowden’ rocks, btw.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:02 PM on September 25, 2014 [1 favorite]