Life of Peter

During the past few months the discussions about the Minority Report pre crime-esque fascist tool, the FRA-law, has faded. From my side, it’s been mostly due to personal reasons — I’ve tried staying out of the media attention for a while to recharge batteries and work with things.

Having the time over I’ve been thinking about how to stop FRA. I work much better as a technology activist than as a politician, so my focus has been to design a system in order to prevent FRA from getting any data from us, even though they can listen in to it.

In order for a circumvention system to become widely spread it needs to be cheap. It also needs to be quite simple to setup. In order for it to be really successful one would have to avoid installing software on clients.

And you know what? I’ve got somewhat of a solution figured out. Right now, we’re building version 0.1 of this system. On paper, it works splendid. I see no reason for it not to work.

Here’s how normal traffic passes from a Swedish computer to the Internet (note: when I’m talking about “the internet” from here and beyond in the blog post, I’m referring to the internet outside of swedens borders).

The end users computer connects to his ISP. The ISP routes the traffic to the internet. Simple. In most cases, the traffic passing the borders will be unencrypted and free for FRA to listen to. They will know what your traffic contains and they will also be able to create a sociogram based on your communication. The sociogram is actually the most important tool for FRA since they will not be able to break any serious encryption, at least not in real time or in any serious volume. We all understand that any people interested in secret communication will be encrypted.

Making things difficult for FRA is somewhat straight forward — use a VPN. The communication in that case will look something like this:

VPN traffic

The tech-scenario here is somewhat simplified. The user connects to the ISP, the ISP routes the user to the VPN-service (which in this case is Ipredator which is hosted within swedish borders). The IP distributed to the internet will now be one of the IPs belonging to the VPN service and not the end users real IP. The traffic will also be encrypted so it will not be easy to listen to the traffic.

This is a cheap way to avoid most monitoring. FRA can still analyze the data since they will see the endpoint of the communication. They will not see the actual traffic nor the actual sender. But if they can gain enough other traffic from their monitoring nodes they might be able to resource that data. Essentially, you can control your own traffic sent, but not the receivers traffic.

What thus must be done is to ensure that the receiving party will also be encrypted! And with no possibility to actually install software on every single computer on the net, this must be done higher up in the hierarchy. This is my simple and relatively cheap solution that we are currently building for Ipredator:

The user connects to his ISP. The traffic is routed to Ipredator. Ipredator combines all the border crossing traffic in a traffic concentrator into one single big encrypted traffic stream. You can compare it to taking all the thousands of letters and putting into one single box. The big box is then sent over the Öresundsbridge to another traffic concentrator in Denmark, that decrypts the big stream into the small letters again.

What will actually happen with this system is that FRA can only see one single connection. It will be a highly encrypted one. It will have one static sender and one static receiver. There can be no sociograms. And the capacity for cracking the encryption for gigabits of traffic in realtime would be so high that it can’t be done with todays computers.

Voilá, we have made the FRA-law technically obsolete.

And the costs?

The traffic concentrators we’re building are based upon the VIA Nano-chipset with it’s Padlock feature. It’s capable of encrypting 12.8Gbps in the CPU. And it costs less than 100 EUR. Of course there will be some costs depending on the bandwidth required (we need two 10 gigabit networking cards per traffic concentrator). However, the costs are one time and then it’s only a discussion with the bandwidth supplier regarding the connection cross the border.

Any ISP can set this up. It requires no installation of software on the users machines. If the Swedish ISPs wants to, they could set this up without the need for a third party VPN-service. It would make the FRA-law totally useless. The cost in total would be very small for the ISPs and my guess is that most of their clients would gladly pay some extra kronor to have this setup.

The same technology could probably also be designed to circumvent the data retention system, somewhat in a tweaked version.
Politicians know that politics beats business. Now they’ll learn that technology beats politics.

I’ll post another entry here when the first concentrator system goes into production here!

Det är ganska lätt att räkna ut vad Acta handlar om, trots att myndigheter (även de myndigheter med tillgång till att läsa Acta) väljer att hela tiden förneka dess rätta innehåll.

Här följer en lista över några företag som stödjer Acta till fullo. Gissa vad de har för intresse här i världen och använd det som kallas för “minsta gemensamma nämnare” inom matematiken för att se vad de har gemensamma mål.

Advertising Photographers of America
American Association of Independent Music (A2IM)
American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA)
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP)
American Society of Media Photographers, Inc. (ASMP)
Association of American Publishers (AAP)
Broadcast Music, Inc (BMI)
Commercial Photographers International
Directors Guild of America (DGA)
Evidence Photographers International Council
Independent Film and Television Alliance (IFTA)
International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE)
Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA)
National Music Publishers Association (NMPA)
NBC Universal
News Corporation
Picture Archive Council of America (PACA)
Professional Photographers of America (PPA)
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
Reed Elsevier Inc.
Society of Sport & Event Photographers
Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA)
Stock Artists Alliance
Student Photographic Society
The Advertising Photographers of America
The Walt Disney Company
Time Warner, Inc.
Universal Music Group
Viacom Inc.
Warner Music Group

“Förhandlingarna innehåller heller inget alls som gäller Internet“, jorå såatte…

För några dagar sedan uppmärksammades det att ett promotion-bolag i Göteborg fått godkänt på att ha registrerat TPBs logotyp (det välkända skeppet) som sin egen logotyp.

Bolaget har såklart ingen nytta av det, förutom att de antagligen är sugna på den uppmärksamhet de kan få i media genom att försöka “piratkopiera piraternas logotyp”, som ju skett tidigare när någon registrerade TPB som varumärke för sprit.

PRV har alltså godkänt registreringen men den här gången, till skillnad från varumärkesregistrering, är det iaf så att det kommit ut information kring det så det finns tid för överklagan. Flera jobbar på att skriva sådana just nu. Allmänheten äger ju logotypen och därför är det inte rätt att något/någon helt plötsligt blir tilldelad en ensamrätt för den. Det är lite smått det loggan står för, att alla skall få kopiera saker som är allmänhetens.

Men det intressanta är faktiskt inte att ett kapitalistiskt företag är ute efter att tjäna pengar på allmänhetens bekostnad – det sker ju hela tiden. Det intressanta är hur svenska myndigheter reagerar när detta händer.

Till att börja med så har ju en handläggare på PRV felaktigt godkänt registreringen. Han påstår alltså att han inte känner igen logotypen trots att den antagligen är en av Sveriges genom tiderna mest kända logotyper. Den syns i tidningar över hela världen dagligen, för att inte prata om att nästan alla större svenska medier har egna sektioner om TPB-saken, där logotypen lyser starkt.

I sverige har vi lag som säger att man inte behöver registrera varumärken eller logotyper om de är “inarbetade” som det lite vagt kallas. Dvs, är det känt nog så har du ensamrätt till den. Och TPB-loggan har sedan dag 1 ansetts vara allmänhetens, därmed så är den vara skyddad från att PRV skall överlåta den rätten till en ensam organisation/individ.

Det kanske är så att PRVs anställda helt enkelt inte har någon som helst kunskap om vad som händer i samhället. Trots att det är deras jobb att hålla lite koll på vad som är inarbetat varumärke/logga så har de #failat lite kan man säga. Eller tyckt det var roligt att ställa till problem, det är ju en individ som sitter där och gör arbetet på myndigheten och han kan ju ha sin egen agenda.

När det kom till folks kännedom att detta skett, så mejlade många in till PRV, däribland både jag och Fredrik Neij. Det intressanta var att när Fredrik mejlade in och frågade hur han kunde invända för allmänhetens intresse, så fick han svar direkt. Men inte från PRV, utan från Sveriges Radio! 1 min och 50 sekunder efter brevet skickades så kommer alltså svar från en journalist, med en kopia på brevet som skickades till en svensk myndighets kundtjänst.

Det är ingen som har problem att prata med journalister hos oss i gamla gänget. Men däremot så tycker jag det är märkligt att en svensk myndighet som egentligen skall behandla ärenden istället väljer att tipsa journalister om något som har skvallerpressvärde egentligen. Det är inte någon som har blivit mördat och myndigheten läcker ut samhällskritisk information, som de borde göra (s.k. “whistle blowing”), utan det är verkligen skvallernivå.

Nu var det inte heller så jättefarligt just därför. Men vad säger att det inte skett förut, eller kommer ske igen? När jag pratade med chefen för kundtjänsten så sa han med en gång att det inte var stämde. Det hade inte skett alls, men om det hade skett så var det inte hans personal som gjort det.
Då finns det ju enbart ett alternativ till, nämligen att någon hackat deras mejl och sen valt att vidarebefordra till media. Vad är värst egentligen? Fel hos personalen eller att en svensk myndighet som hanterar register med massa hemlig information så lätt läcker ut material via hackers? Det är inte direkt troligt att en hacker ens hade valt att röja sig själv på en så onödig sak heller såklart.

Myndigheter bör väl värna om privatpersoners rätt till att kommunicera med dem i fred? Hade jag mejlat något känsligare till PRV och det hade läckt så hade det kunnat få riktigt stora konsekvenser. Och det kanske sker?

Precis som i FRA-fallet så är det nämligen individer som sitter och gör egna bedömningar av den datan som de får tag i. Någon tipsar skvallerpress för att man kan få några tusen kronor. Andra kanske läcker datan till värre personer som betalar för det, eller bara för att den personen har en egen politisk agenda. Och samtidigt har vi fått en lag som säger att all data, även den vi inte valt att ge bort, skall samlas in och hanteras. Av individer.

Vi ser gång på gång hur svenska register läcker data på olika sätt. Okunskap, illvilja såväl som pengar kan ligga bakom. Det slår aldrig fel och ändå bygger vi upp ett samhälle som är baserat på att vi skall lita på att det inte kan ske.

Idag skriver jag på Newsmill om censur gällande barnpornografifiltret.

Kjell Bohlund skriver i SvD (22/10) att Google bryter grundlagen om de indexerar alla böcker som finns.

Förlåt? Kjell Bohlund, samma person som inte tyckte det var något problem att indexera alla böcker som fanns tillgängliga via The Pirate Bay, och sedan nyttja materialet kommersiellt i en rapport? Trots att policyn på denna sajten klart och tydligt säger att man får nyttja materialet enbart i privat syfte och inte i s.k. kommersiellt syfte? Att tjäna pengar på något material som man fått tag på via TPB har ingen någonsin tyckt varit Ok.

Dubbelmoralen är klassisk för personer i maktpositioner. När deras monopol utmanas så stämplar makthavarna utmanaren som brottsling. Detta har vi sett ett otal gånger i meningslösa, utdragna, dyra rättegångar som i grund och botten enbart handlar om att befästa maktpositionen och hindra normal teknisk evolution. Radio, kassettband, för att inte tala om självspelande pianon har varit stämplade som brottsteknik. Själv bryter den drabbade industrin lagar till höger och vänster. Även moraliskt tveksamt så köper de sig passande lagar genom att spendera miljarder på lobbyism, utan hänsyn till hur samhället drabbas.

Bohlund anser att googles indexering skulle bryta svensk grundlag, upphovsrättslagen, som enligt honom har fungerat bra sedan 1809. Den ter sig lika självklar för honom 2009, utan behov för att anpassa sig efter modern tid. Jag undrar såklart vad Bohlund tycker om kvinnlig rösträtt och om han anser homosexuella vara psykiskt sjuka? Kollektiv bestraffning, genom att vara en av de mest högljudda som hejade fram IPRED-lagen, har han ju redan visat sig vara positiv till.

BBC såväl som NRK har långtgående diskussioner om att släppa sina enorma arkiv fria. Det är en naturlig teknisk evolution som vi eftersträvar och kommer samhället till gagn. Problemet är upphovsrätten. Man förhindras av något så okonstruktivt som avtal! Nu pratas det om en mediafond dit staten i respektive land betalar in en klumpsumma varje år, som sedan fördelas till de personer som en gång i tiden skapat det arkiverade materialet. Det är ungefär vad Google vill göra också. Känns det inte himla logiskt och samhällsnyttigt?

För att samhället skall må bra så måste man vara villig att anpassa sig efter tiden man lever i. Maktpositionerna förändrar sig. Visst, det är naturligt att personer på en bekväm position vill försvara den men det är knappast något produktivt för allmänheten. Genom ny teknik så förändras förlagens roll, till följd får författarna mer kontroll och direktkontakt med sina läsare. Och då har vi inte ens gått in på att både författare och läsare rent ekonomiskt får det bättre genom en sådan struktur.

Den, inom bokbranschen, överhetsstyrde mecenatkulturen som Bohlund tycker har blivit utbytt mot folkstyre finns nämligen kvar. Bohlund är lite insiktslös och ser inte att det är just han och hans kollegor som nu innehar den rollen.

För att citera min egen kära bror, den prisbelönta författaren och kulturskribenten Mats Kolmisoppi; “När det gäller makten över det egna verket har jag som upphovsman ett långt mer problematiskt förhållande till förlagsvärlden än till en anslagstavla på internet.” (Expressen 4/3)

Att vi en gång i tiden gick med på att skriva under på ett par avtal, betyder inte att de avtalen är anpassade efter dagens samhälle. 1809 fanns inget internet, vi hade ingen digitalisering. Hade man känt till framtiden hade man nog inte skrivit under samma papper.

BREIN is now claiming that they didn’t make the false reports, that I blogged about yesterday.

I was hoping for them to say just that, it was kind of what I was expecting. That’s because I left some parts a bit open (about Experian). I don’t need Experians research, as there is something as interesting as two different versions of the experian document out there….

Yes! I have promised not to publish it yet, but the people that gave me the alternative version have sent the data to wikileaks. I will link to the report as soon as I have a link to give you, but keep an eye on Wikileaks for the time being. It also contains the rest of the documents that I talked about yesterday.

The alternative PDF is the one that BREIN has sent to the court of Amsterdam. It has a certain details that is quite interesting that proves BREIN has done the report themselves, and that Experian is not the creators. We only received a fax so we could not check for all the data we wanted.

If running “pdfinfo” on the .PDF file you’ll find this data:

CreationDate:   Thu Jul 30 15:55:34 2009
ModDate:        Fri Aug 28 17:12:52 2009

That means that the original PDF was created in July, and then it has been altered at least on 28 of august. That was just a couple of days before it was sent via fax to our lawyer in the netherlands. It was actually modified on a Friday after normal work hours. So after the weekend it was sent to our lawyer.

The interesting thing is yet again the footers! Remember the old one? It said:

Copyright © 2009 Experian Ltd

Yes, this alternative version (originally sent to the court, remember, the court can verify the document!) contains the same. But just before that it also contains this:

Dept.: 00    Invoice Ref.:FOC
Copyright © 2009 Experian Ltd

The interesting thing here is that data is missing in the faxed version, compared to the original sent to the court.

Why would Experian send out two different versions? And why would Experian send out a PDF with a modification date — hell, they made the document through a computerized system. Yes, some PDFs from Experian contains a modification date as well, but those matches the creation date.

I was hoping to release the document myself right now, but I’m leaving tomorrow morning to the far east. I hope that Wikileaks will have the document online in a few hours, otherwise I will get the document somewhere on the web myself after I land.

Mr. Kuk, you’re busted!

EDIT: The data is now available as a torrent by one of the people who gave it to me

Today there was a hearing in The Netherlands, of BREIN vs Svartholm/Neij/Sunde, aka, my friends and I, regarding The Pirate Bay.

BREIN has been accusing us for breaking dutch law with allowing people in The Netherlands to access TPB.
They actually won the first case, on a default judgement since we didn’t show. We didn’t show because we didn’t even know about the case until two days before. Similar behaviour has been shown in Italy where we actually lost a court case because we were not aware of it. There is of course also the issue of jurisdiction. We are not living in the Netherlands any of us nor do we have any connection to the country that I am aware of…

… also, there’s this little thing of us not owning The Pirate Bay.

However, BREIN does not think that is important.
Our lawyer put forward an investigation done by a Swedish authority, Kronofogden, stating that the three of us do not own The Pirate Bay since it’s owned by a company called Reservella. The investigation done by Kronofogden was ordered by Ifpi and the MPAA, since they wanted to make sure that they could freeze all of our assets, including TPB. It was a win for us that the authority proved that none of us owns TPB, as we have been trying to state for a while. Hollywood was probably quite pissed at this time as well.

But BREIN can of course not give up their political campaign against us. So they decided to sue Reservella as well! Not drop the case against us, but add Reservella to the court case. (Just as they already did with the potential buyer of TPB once before. They actually sued a company to make sure it would not break any laws in the future even if they had no intention of doing so. Hey, it’s called a law, it’s not allowed to break. We don’t need a ruling from a court stating that a certain company or person is not allowed to break a law in the future. He/she/it’s by default not allowed to do that.)

Fine, adding Reservella makes sense, even to me, even though I don’t agree with it being in jurisdiction or even legal.

Problem right now was that BREIN could not back down from the previous court case – they would have to pay up the legal fees themselves, and they would maybe also have to pay damages if they agreed that we are not the responsible party. The legal fees are already exceeding EUR60,000, and they really want us to have to pay those bills, even though they know we can’t.

So there was no option for BREIN to remove us from the case. But they needed to add the company as well. How do they solve it?

Then magic happens: BREIN gets a hold of a credit report from the UK company Experian that proves that Reservella is connected to Fredrik!

They send it to the court and our legal counsil gets a copy. I receive it as well and can’t believe my eyes; FREDRIK IS THE CEO AND DIRECTOR OF RESERVELLA! This was news to all of us, and we didn’t know what to say.
Most of us that know Fredrik, in all fairness, understands that he is not the most organized person. None of us really are. We have been charged with doing organizing crime, but it should have been noted as disorganized crime. At least that way, one of the two words would actually fit us. This means, we were quite sure he did not have an offshore company setup and do all of this. And if he did, at least he would be smart enough to not be a director in it.

I’ve uploaded the evidence from BREIN to this blog post. Please analyze it. I have done so and we presented the analysis in court.

Reservella – Experian Report

I will go through the report, almost in chronoligcal order, don’t worry.

1) Name of the company: “RESERVELLA“.
It does not note the type of company it is. Most countries require that a company name contains a term in the beginning or end of the name that denotes what type of entity it is. That is, Ltd, AB, GmbH or similar. It is strange that it does not show up in the report. But, more on the name later!

2) Registered legal address: “Suite 13, 1 Fl, etc”
More on this later, please remember this.

3) License number: “32549”
This is the unique ID for a company in the Seychelles. This is a term you can search for to get information, such as the legal name, of a company.

4) Date of Registration: “28 June, 2004”
This is the date the company was founded.

5) (skip a bit in the document, I’m trying to make a good detective story here)
Registered Agent: “MOSSACK FONSECA & CO (SEYCHELLES) LTD”

then comes the really interesting part:

5) Management: “Fredrik Neij, CEO“.
Woooot! It also shows up later in the document, under “Company Management” and again in the end under “Company Directors“. It clearly states, that Fredrik Neij is not only the CEO of Reservella, but also the Director. It also shows that Fredrik is a citizen of Seychelles! So much information about my friend, that none of us had any idea about!

Turns out, it’s so much secret information that not even Hans Fredrik Lennart Neij knew about it! Oh yes, that long name is Fredriks real legal name. A name that shows up in any database that you would find his name. His passport, his bank card, all of his documents contain that full long name. On everything essentially…

… besides one particular place.

If you’re running a smart operating system, please open up a terminal and do the following:

whois thepiratebay.org

You’ll see this interesting information (I cut out the juicy parts only, but please verify by your own whois):

Domain Name:THEPIRATEBAY.ORG
Created On:28-Jun-2004 16:08:27 UTC
Registrant Name:Fredrik Neij
Registrant Organization:Reservella

Now, what does this data tell us?

Let’s compare notes.
1) Fredriks real name is not just “Fredrik Neij”. But on the domain name “thepiratebay.org” it is. Nowhere else, oh besides this credit report.
2) The name “Reservella” turns up in the whois since they own the domain. We know that Reservella is actually “Reservella Limited” as a legal name. But on the whois, this entity type is left out.

Now, honestly. Fredrik does normally only use “Fredrik Neij”. And none of us say “Nokia Oy”, we only say Nokia. So sure, it could have just been left out on a manual credit check?

But how come;

3) Creation date of the domain matches the exact registration date of Reservella?

Is it just a weird cosmic co-incidence? I believe in facts, so I started checking out some facts.

After some minutes with Google I found out that you could order information about companies on the seychelles quite easily for some cash. We did two searches; one for company registration 32549 as stated in the report, and one for all companies named Reservella.

Turns out that none of the data in the report actually matched, anything. The company under registration 32549 was named Elara Ltd. And they closed down in 2007, so there is probably noone that picks up the phone if you call them! It also turns out that “Reservella” was “Reservella Limited“. None of the two companies was at the stated address. None of them had the stated agent. None of them had the stated creation date. And you know what? After a little bit of more googling I learned something new!

Turns out that Seychelles does not even keep a register of Directors or CEOs….

So the only place where this data could come from? Must be that company Mossack Fonseca & co. But fear not. I have magic e-mail skills as well. Here’s the answer I got from them;

“Reference is made to your mail below and we would like to inform you that this name does not appear on our database and under no circumstances do we divulged information on our clients nor directors of a company to any third parties unless it is a court case and under the Seychelles law, we give the information to the authorities concerned only.

We would like if there is any possibility of knowing why our name, address and contact appears on that company when we do not have anything to do with it.”

Even more interesting, after speaking with this company who seemed quite upset with having their name associated with a #lie, they sent a fax stating the same, and even more. They included one special quote;

“Furthermore, we have not had any contact with Experian.”

So, turns out the source of it all is someone at Experian!

We started looking for more information about this big UK company.

On their other credit reports we found out there on the interwebs, all of them had a footer similar to “Report created on Fri, 10 Jun 2005 at 11:07:59    Dept.: 00    Invoice Ref.:INT839118 Copyright © 2005 Experian Ltd“.

On the one we received the footer was just “Copyright © 2009 Experian Ltd“. No other data. No invoice reference. No creation date. The missing data was not something one would actually remove from a credit report, now is it? There is actually no date of when the credit report was made at all in the document!

I didn’t include all the data in the report before now. It’s not for the suspense, I think you already know what this blog post is going to prove. But it’s just a little de-tour, call it “just for the lulz” and for the nail in the coffin for this report.
Notice how it says “Commercial Credit Inquiries“? And that there was a previous credit report done on Reservella (or Elara, or whomever the report is refering to)? The date is “30 Jul, 2009“. What happened that day? Oh yes, GGF X AB announced that they wanted to buy The Pirate Bay!
But sure, there is a chance that someone actually searched for a credit report in the Seychelles for Reservella that day, since the deal was actually revealed and Reservella was known to the world to exist…
… or was it? Because the name of the selling company was not really revealed before the next day, and even if it leaked out, the time difference to the seychelles would have made it impossible to get any data from the registry at that hour…

Now back to the main track;

Being good at google is a great skill. Being good at e-mailing and even receiving faxes is quite a cool skill as well. Skill that BREIN might not understand that we have. We have yet another skill they might be shocked of us having, using phones!

I got in touch with Experian. The information I got from them was simply that they couldn’t find a copy of the credit report themselves. After a lot of going back and forth they started an investigation into the authenticity of the credit report. They have not given me final report on it, but they have been very clear in stating that they have not confirmed the report. They have a big corporation so it might take some more time, but it’s being worked on.

And the question is, why would Experian make a false credit report? A company that does one thing for a living, with hundred of employees all over the world, give out trustworthy credit reports. They would of course not risk it to help a small antipiracy agency out in their high profile political game! And as you all can clearly see from the overwhelming evidence, the credit report is fake. Backed up by evidence from the lawyers of Mossack Fonseca & Co. Backed up by the government of Seychelles, times two – First by their company registry. And I actually called and asked if Fredrik was a citizen of their country. The answer was, as expected, Neij. He’s not.

It’s also clear that the government does not keep the data of the CEO nor the directors of companies.
It is clear that the previous inquiry is bullshit, at least on that date.
It is clear that the date of registration is taken from the whois of thepiratebay.org
It is clear that Fredriks name is taken from the same whois;
… and it’s clear that Reservellas name is taken from there (or from the air, it doesn’t really matter).

It is very clear to me what has happened. My well educated, well established, well founded hunch is that BREIN realized that they were going to lose hard and in order to win, they themselves had to create false evidence and hand that over to the court!

When I have the final Ok from my super lawyer, I will hand out the rest of the papers I am referring to as well (fax, Seychelles government printouts etc). As long as it’s fine with the judges so it doesn’t ruin our case. And I’m hoping that the judge sees this the same way we do, this is yet another #spectrial farse!

I am right now filing criminal charges against both Tim Kuik personally as well as BREIN to the dutch police. I consider what they have done as criminal. Much more severe than any “aiding with potential copyright infringement” could ever be.

The charges will be forgery (the document is stated to come from a third party and used as evidence in a court of law) and fraud (by gaining from this, both monetarily as well as politically). Both of these things must be considered as serious crimes as this has been done both for monetary reasons (over 60.000 EUR at stake here!) as well as being brought forward in a court of law.

Maybe then we can finally have the real criminals shut down and put in jail!

Just go over to Boing Boing and read the full story. Those guys rock!

(Short: Boing Boing responds to DMCA threat the correct way)

Som många vet är jag otroligt lack på Beatrice Ask. Men inte bara för uppenbara orsaker utan även för att hon gång på gång kommer med lagförslag som är totalt osolidariska och hon sysslar hellre med negativ bestraffning än positivt tänkande och problemlösning.

Nyaste förslaget är alltså att göra föräldrar ansvariga för barns brott. Ekonomiskt åtminstone.

I Sverige, liksom i de flesta demokratier, är kollektiv bestraffning olaglig. Detta förslaget kringgår också de mänskliga rättigheter som länderna inom FN har enats om; “Envar har rätt att allestädes erkännas som person i lagens mening“.

Helt enkelt så har den blåa regeringen valt att kollektivt bestraffa de familjer som antagligen har det som svårast. Att ha en ung människa i sin familj som av olika anledningar begår brott är ett straff i sig. Ett straff för en dålig familjepolitik såväl som  integrationspolitik.

Inte sällan begås brott på grund av samhällets sätt att ta hand om dessa unga människor. Som ung, och speciellt som invandrare som man mellan raderna förstår att Beatrice Ask med sin blåa regering syftar till, så sitter man redan i en position där samhället inte hjälper till med de situationer som uppstår. Hjälp att bryta kriminella utvägar i fattiga områden är en positiv lösning som regeringen borde satsa på. Att skaffa jobb och hopp åt de tusentals arbetslösa är något som bör göras.

Istället väljer man nu att låta utsatta barnfamiljer betala för de stora problem som regerings politik leder till.

Jag avslutar med ett “blåfeministiskt med klassisk kärnfamiljstänk om mamman som är hemma med barnen”-citat från Beatrice Ask;

- Du kan inte som mamma säga “jag hade ingen aning”

Ibland så kan få ut mycket information ur en enda rad med text.

There’s a discussion on the internets about what data the ISPs and service providers should be allowed to store, and for how long.

Happily, I’ve noticed that Telia, Swedens largest ISP and Telco, has decided to shorten the time they are going to store IP-address information about their customers. It of course leads to the inevitable discussion “will someone please think of the children” — that the information is also usable in case of child porn crimes or other serious crime.

On IPREDator we have decided to not store information at all. We have been heavily criticized for that for the same reason — what do you do in case there’s actual legit reasons to get that information?

Since we try to be as transparent as possible, I will here outline our ideas about this.

First, YES, it is a problem that a service MIGHT be used for illegal things. It probably won’t, but if it does, how can we cope with that? How can we help the police to actually find people that are doing serious crimes? The discussion has been so black or white that we have now come to a place where we have the people who are for total surveillance of the net, and the ones who are against any form of surveillance.

I’m one of those people who think we should be allowed to think, speak our minds and have our privacy. I’m also one of those people who thinks it’s important that the police have a possibility to investigate real crime that has a real impact on private people. I’m not talking when big corporations loses control which is the case why they are upset with file sharing.

We might have come up with a solution for this problem, that goes hand in hand with our believes. It’s not perfect, but it might work.

The idea is to work together with companies outside of our jurisdiction. Why can’t the ISPs for instance work together over borders? Set up a structure where the logs, instead of being deleted, gets copied to another country. Store them there for a reasonable amount of period that your users agree upon. Set up a board of people you trust in that country that has a decision to make: If the police asks for data, they can give it out if the board agrees that the necessity of this data is bigger than the impact of loss of privacy. Child porn, terrorism and so forth can than be investigated. Or rather; the possibility of them being investigated is there if they would actually happen, which they won’t on a normal system. It would effectively take away the argument that removing the logs is making other investigations fail.

The back side of it all is that we have people that morally decide what is supposed to be investigated, it’s not really democratic.
But the laws today are not democratic anymore anyhow. Most people does not think that IPRED should have gone through. 95-98% are against the IPRED directive according to most studies I’ve seen (!).

Until we can’t have democracy we might have to play the game by the rules set up by the corporations. And we’ll beat them at it. Right now we’re trying to find a partner for IPREDator to help us which such a solution. But we will of course only do it if our users think it’s Ok.

Or easier – just remove the stupid laws that regulate all of this, and we can have a safe community.