On Thursday last week, Swedish ISP Bahnhof was “visited” by police, the Enforcement Administration (see summary) and the Anti-Piracy Association (hereafter the APB). They had a warrant to search the company’s servers for illegal copies of four movies and eight music albums - they found no trace of these particular works; however the four servers confiscated during the raid contained several hundred thousand other illegal files (movies, software and music). Now, the APB are planning to file another lawsuit against the ISP for these files. The company claims it knows nothing about these servers (rumoured to be some of the largest in Europe), but has suspended two of its employees pending an investigation. Anyway - that’s just a bit of background, that’s not what this post is about. Other people have been writing about this for days. Nor do I intend to discuss the ethics of file sharing, there is legislation that deals with that.
I’ve taken some time today to look into the discussions that have followed this event, especially in the Swedish discussion forums. Naturally, most of the voices raised are critical. (Interestingly enough; after a while all the people seem to be critical of each other and completely forgetting the issue they are discussing, but this is just normal ‘net behaviour.) Some take good old-fashioned drunken-footballer approach ("All authorities are bastards, I think we should all go and get our baseball bats out and wreck the mall."), others adopt the academic stance ("Well, in fact, according to section 34 of European Union statute 140:03a, also backed up by the third paragraph of the Geneva convention [2nd revision], paragraph 15A, a figure of authority may not seize, confiscate or in any other way refuse access too, any information that may or may not potentially have life-saving properties for children under the age of 14."), yet others use cryptic the cryptic language of script kiddies all over the globe ("u R S0 1am3 - wh0 u5e5 p2p aNyWaY? pwnd!!!"), while others still simply chip in for the hell of it ("If you’re going to post to this forum, you should at least learn to spell properly!"). Others, like me, sit back and don’t interfere - it’s not going to help anyway.
One of the themes that does seem to come back in this discussion (and any other discussion even remotely touching the Holy Grail of the Internet community; “Information wants to be free”), is that the authorities are acting like some form of Big Brother figure (the Orwellian kind, not the TV series), just because they are meddling with what people are doing. Some people accuse (and I have to stress that this is only rumours) the APB of trying to break into any computer that visits its webpage (currently defaced/DNSjacked so I won’t link to it) to see if there is any illicit material on there. OK, so fair enough, I don’t want the authorities to snoop through everything I do or listen in on my phone calls either, but this is about breaking laws. For investigations, I understand that police may need to tap a phone or emails ISPs have a legal obligation in many countries to provide this service), confiscate material and sift through it, I buy that.
A lot of people, in this particular case, are also critical of the methods used for this raid. Some of this may be rumours, but most things are substantiated in the media coverage, so I’ll accept that for fact - at least until someone proves me wrong. It appears that the APB (who is a private organisation and does not have a legislative or enforcing task) staff was present during the raid and walked freely in the ISP premises. Also, it is claimed that someone infiltrated the Bahnhof staff and blew the whistle - something this person probably is going to end up regretting, no matter how proud he feels about having “done good". There are several other turns to come here, I’m sure.
My angle, after all that preamble, is that the APB webpage has been hijacked and now points to another page which names the whistleblower. After all the discussion about how Big Brother interferes with our civil rights - these people (who call themselves Arga unga hackare - Angry young hackers) have proven that they themselves do just this! They post copies of internal / personal emails; they even track back his IP address to find his address and social security number (information that I know for a FACT that they shouldn’t have access to), they track him down on IRC by using what they refer to their “back doors planted on IRC servers in several networks” and send him threatening messages. They claim to have had the passwords for the APB and other organisations for more than four years, meaning that they can effectively intercept everything.
So when you’re on the Internet in the future, remember: Big Brother is watching you, but he may not be who you think he is. The chances are that he is a lot younger than that, and that he doesn’t work for a government agency or any of the kind. He could very well be just someone who’s happened to stumble onto your password or other information and is just waiting for the right moment to use it. Be very careful with who you upset out there.
