UK Police Charge Suspected Anonymous Spokesman 247
An anonymous reader writes "Scotland Yard has tonight charged 18-year-old Jake Davis, who was arrested in the Shetland Islands last week, with five offenses including unauthorized computer access and conspiracy to carry out a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack against the SOCA (Serious Organized Crime Agency) website. When announcing his arrest on Wednesday, police said that they believed Davis used the online nickname 'Topiary' and acted as the spokesperson for the Anonymous and LulzSec hacking groups. Topiary's final twitter message said 'You can't arrest an idea' just before his arrest."
Re:Today's lesson (Score:4, Interesting)
That does not matter.
Do you think the riots which resulted in many death in other countries were the "right way" to do it? Probably not.
The point is that no other way works. You can't spend 30 years of your life trying to get a big political party and get shot down by your own guys after those 30 years. What you can do is protest. And if you protest, it's not going to be an email or a blog post, even not a public performance.
You protest with things that everyone is going to _care_ about.
Riots. Hacking high level web sites. Whatever else. At least, they don't kill people or destroy their lives - the government does that, daily, if you haven't noticed. That the proven way to change things, so far.
What I find the most sad, is such arguments as "real activists" "saving lives". It sounds like "and also they capture pedophiles" and such crap. They don't save lives. They also don't do shit. If you haven't noticed that either, the governments, corporations haven't changed, and never do, until a revolution rise. How long do your real activists need, 100, 200, 500 years? Please, get a fucking clue.
Revolutions started by riots, and other such acts,once again. Hacking is part of that, now.
Re:Today's lesson (Score:3, Interesting)
"Neither the British or US government is an evil fascist state which brutally subjugates the populace"
You haven't been watching their actions lately, have you? Teahadists and Republicrats alike essentially holding our asses hostage over non-existent fucking money, acting like the world fucking police, and trying to undermine the foundation of their governments for the profit of their friends.
Take your blinders off.
Re:You can arrest the person (Score:5, Interesting)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/internet-abuzz-with-claims-that-uk-police-picked-up-the-wrong-topiary.ars [arstechnica.com]
It's possible that they are tossing the police ringers.
Re:Do they have any evidence (Score:4, Interesting)
So, we're talking Britain here. There's still splinter groups out there from the IRA who also have spokespersons. There's people who blow up subway cars who have spokespersons. The idea here is to use a route that still protects the real core of damage causers, meaning your spokesperson doesn't really know all that much. Maybe one or more of those meatspace groups won't bother to call in and take 'responsibility' for the next atrocity and the British government will be left wondering just which group did it. A government that goes after spokespersons better have reason to think they can provide important, even vital data, or there's a big downside. Going after one for possibly knowing 'something' is simultaneously saying the group you are after isn't a real threat and you're confident your actions won't provoke them more than the info the spokesperson gives you is worth. Do you see any reason why the British government can make such a claim to its citizens?
Why are most of these evil hackers teenagers? (Score:3, Interesting)
Extraordinary rendition (Score:3, Interesting)
This is completely crazy. They guy was in Shetland, in Scotland, and the Met Police flew up from London in a light aircraft, landed, raided his house and flew him out on the same aircraft to London, England. He was arrested in one legal jurisdiction and is being held in another. This is like the FBI flying from Washington DC to Oregon, arresting someone, and flying them straight out to Washington again. It's not legal. Add to that that in Scotland he can only be held for 24 hours without charge but in England he can be held, it seems, indefinitely with court approval and you have an extraordinary rendition. The human rights court is going to have a nightmare with this one, and the UK is alreadytearing itself apart due to the incompatibilities of one sovereign state having two seperate 'sovereign' legal systems.
Anyway, I asked for an answer from the Scottish First Minister. He's already fighting with the 'federal' UK government over this.
Free @Topiary!
Re:Today's lesson (Score:4, Interesting)
Anarchy has never benefited a single country on the face of the planet.
I am not a fan of Anarchism as a political system, but that sentence is empirically wrong. In early 20th century europe there were at least two cases I know of, Ukraine and Spain, where Anarchism lasted for a while, and was pretty successful in economical terms. For Spain for example it's more or less proven that the anarchist period saw a sharp rise in worker productivity.
Both didn't last long in the grand scale of things, but their military defeat does not relate to them being anarchist regions - they were just small and didn't have a chance against their much more powerful enemy (Spain: The spanish fascist movement with support from other fascist movements from all over Europe; Ukraine: the Red Army).
Re:You can arrest the person (Score:5, Interesting)
It wouldn't be the first time. The UK police have no problem arresting people based on the flimsiest of evidence and then hoping they will crack during questioning. Unfortunately what tends to happen is that the person doesn't admit to something they didn't do and they end up dragging it out for as long as possible and then trying to bullshit their way to a conviction in court. If the defence lawyer is any good they get some experts in to refute the evidence, but unfortunately there is a tendency not to do that if the prosecution has already decided to use an expert witness because it is assumed that said witness will be impartial and objective.
Operation Ore is the most notorious example of police relying on clearly flawed evidence, but there are many others. In Operation Ore they received a large number of credit card numbers that had been used to pay for child pornography from US police and simply arrested all the card holders. They didn't bother to check if the card details had been stolen, they just rushed in and destroyed dozens of lives for a few easy headlines.
The only Omagh bombing suspect's trial collapsed because all they had was weak DNA evidence which matched him and a schoolboy in England. Barry George did several years in prison based on a single spec of gunpowder found on his clothes, which were stored in a room containing other garments with gunpowder on them.
Re:Do they have any evidence (Score:4, Interesting)
The modus operandi of government in the UK is "we must be seen to act, so do something, anything".
This applies as much to the police as with politicians, since in the last 10 or 15 years the police has progressivelly been politicised (with any high-level manager that didn't dance to the tune being sidelined) and they're usually called upon to be the tool that does the some kind of action for the cameras.
The outcome is that they cannot be trusted: have they got the right man? Have they got the wrong man? Who knows.
They got somebody and the media reported they're doing something, so the real objective of the operation has already been achived. Probably in 2 or 3 months time when this guy finally faces a court (the only part of the system that actually cares about finding out the truth, rather than convicting somebody) it's quite possible that he's found innocent (or maybe all they manage to pin on him is something minor) and they will quietly release him, since by then the media would have moved on.
As the recent News of The World debacle has shown, in the UK the press has a huge amount of influence and both the politicians and high-level management inside the police have been trained to quickly find somebody to sacrifice whenever the press demands blood.