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View Full Version : Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau commits virtual suicide


Thaum1el
03-22-05, 08:15PM
About two weeks ago, the attorney and the IRA decided to raid one of Swedens biggest Internet providers, Bahnhof, because they had servers suspected of being used for piracy of movies, games and music.

They made the bust, because they were tipped off by the Anti-Piracy Bureau (hereafter abbrev. APB) - the Swedish equivalent to the anti-piracy organisations in the US (with RIAA as flagship) put under one umbrella.

After only a few hours the APB filed a police report. This was already then a big scandal, because if they knew who personally was behind the servers, they must have gotten leaks from the IRA or attorney.

Second, the servers they took were empty, but there were proof that there HAD been pirated stuff on it.

A couple of night ago, the APBs website was hacked. People that has had access to the entire APB network for years put out some interesting points. They first published e-mail correspondence between the APB lawyer Henrik Pontén and a person called Peter, suggesting that for something another, Peter was getting paid by the APB for doing some surveillance work. In another mail published just underneath, the named Peter bragged to some friends that he and his associates had for almost two years infiltrated one of the roughest pirating networks of Europe.

The hackers had then gone through Peters ISP and extended IPs and masks enough to expose him as "peter@anti-piracy.se" (i.e. the APBs own e-mail addresses), with the name Peter Bergström, often using the IRC under the name of Rogue.

Now, there were also alot of contact between Peter Bergström, both under his real name and his handle with the APB on the APBs internal logs. So there definately is a connection there, and hints of some sort of payment.

Now, when Bahnhof made their own private investigation in their own logs, since they were under a police investigation and wanted to cooperate, of course, they made an amazing discovery. Yes, one of the server that had been taken in the raid had been used for piracy. Piracy at amazing levels.

Most of this piracing had been done by one individual, who was not hired by the company but who had access to some of their experimental servers - included the one used for piracy, since he had known one of the co-workers (who will prolly get fired and reported as well).

This outsider had downloaded and uploaded so much data, that if you take the entire log, line by line, and put it in Word or another word processor, with the font Arial at 6 pts. size, the list would fill up 988 A4 pages.

The person, ladies and gentlemen, used the handle Rogue.

So, if this can be proven, it can be proven that this server has been running, first at another ISP. The APB has known this but not moved towards it. Instead they had paid a mould to infiltrate those responsible. At some point, the server moved to the highly respected ISP Bahnhof. The APB had known this but not moved with the knowledge. On Bahnhofs network, their paid mould used the server to make 68,111 ups- and downloads of pirated software, music and movies. And then the attorney and IRA struck the ISP, obviously leaked info about it to the APB (who prolly tipped them off in the first place) and filed a report against the ISP for a crime they had actually financed.

So what do you think, guys? The analysis of most people that have followed this events believe that the APB could more or less stop their activities. They won't be taken seriously after this. The police and attorney will probably think twice about if they can trust the APB, after the APB is now by circumstancial evidence suspected by a large portion of the Swedish online community for planting evidence and filing a report based on it.

My guess is that mr Pontén, their lawyer and spokesperson, is running a large risque of loosing hi membership in the Lawyaer Association of Sweden - and thus his lawyer license.

And it might take a year or two before anti-piracy in organised form can make themselves heard after this very embarrasing scandal.

Thaum1el
03-22-05, 08:31PM
Background information:
The Anti-Pirate Bureau made themselves impopular already from the beginning when they launched, getting infamous for ads where they urged people who knew their workplace used illegal software copies to rport to them. After pressure and fuzz they decided to remove the adds on popular demand.

During the last year, they have instead been infamous for making organized citizens arrests, where they have monitored pirates to an extent that they know they'll find wares, and make citizens arrests. This has been highly critized in media, of course, but technically legal. However, it has been hard to get anyone sentenced, attorneys has been unwilling to make a case out of it, because it is difficult under Swedish online privacy laws as of the late 90's to sentence people on logged IP addresses - the APB has been forced to be sure they find pirated good on servers - logs has not been enough to convict.

The Swedish debate on piracy has been as inflammed as everywhere else. From the following half year (July 1st 2005) it is illegal to download pirated material on the Internet. However, the police has said to the press that they "hope that the law will fullfill itself in that people will avoid breaking it, but the police do not have resources to go hard on those that break the law and the crime will not be high priority." Sweden has a rather high degree of unsolved crimes of a higher degree involving robberies and violence.

The other day, Thomas Bodström, the Swedish Minster of Justice, said to the press that "The police have more important things to do than to hunt for pirating teens."

Also, as mentioned above, it can be very difficult to get a conviction of pirates based on logs - not only because of the chance of forgery of logs. But also because - and here comes the interesting part - because of the late 90's law concerning personal details on computer networks (known as PUL, which was very debated when it was passed in 1998) IP addresses are under law concidered personal details. And according to an attorney that spoke to the press the other day, he and his colleagues are reluctant to press charges based on logs, because peoples privacy has a higher priority in this case than losses in income or property claimed by the other part.

Thaum1el
03-22-05, 08:32PM
And, it should be IRS, not IRA.

JakeD
03-22-05, 08:39PM
Wow, that's going to be a hell of a scandal. Too bad something like this doesn't happen in the US. :/ Keep us posted!

Thaum1el
03-22-05, 09:17PM
Will definately do.