Operation Take Down

For those of you not skilled in the Swedish language the debate that has taken place in Sweden following the take down of The Pirate bay may not have been that easy to grasp. I'll try to break it down to you. First of all I am the legal advisor to The Piratebay. You may or may not know me by my alias "Judas_I".

This is what happened. The unedited truth, delivered to you from an insiders perspective.

On Wednesday the 31st of May I had just returned to my home in Köping and just started to relax when I hear that there is someone at the door. This "someone" turned out to be four police officers from both Rikskriminalen (the equivalent of the FBI) and the local police. They told me that they had come to arrest me and bring me in for questioning. Being a trained law professional I immediately asked them about the circumstances of this questioning and they replied that I was a suspect in a copyright infringement case.

At this point I told the nice officers to kindly step outside and wait for me to return. This suggestion did not generate the expected action. They had no intention of leaving. They were there to stay. Kind of like that bad hangover you get from drinking to much dark ale and moonshine. Apparently they had an order do search the premises for eventual contraband.

I'm then swiftly removed from the apartment and shipped with no further delay to the local police station for questioning. I ask for a lawyer to be present and my request is granted, which is more than can be said in the case of Gottfrids (known as Anakata) questioning. He was summarily denied the right to legal representation during questioning.

The "questioning", if it actually qualifies as that, begins. They only seem to want to know answers to questions they already have the answers to. Questions that I KNOW for a fact that they already know the answers to. The hearing lasts for only about 15 minutes and I get a chance to talk to the lawyer present in private.

While talking the officer conducting the hearing suddenly enters the room only to inform me that an order has been issued by the prosecutor to collect a DNA-sample from me. For an instant I think that she is trying to make a tasteless joke. But I can tell from her facial expression that she is not. Do I sense a touch of rapture from her? Is she enjoying this as much as I am NOT enjoying it?

(Note that a court order is not needed to get a DNA-sample in Sweden. Only an executive decision by the prosecutor handling the case. The only criteria that he has to adhere to are that jail must be a possible punishment for the crime and that the person forced to leave the sample is under justified suspicion of the crime. However an infringement into someone’s right to protection from invasive procedures of this magnitude requires that a criterion of necessity and proportionality is considered. "Luckily" in this case the prosecutor is not one know from listening to whiny arguments about personal freedoms and other such nancy stuff)

the spirits in Köpings small police station are high today. They have finally caught one of the "big fish", a real menace to society, one of the devils disciples on earth: A trained law professional that ACTUALLY tells IMMORAL filesharingpromotors what the law of the land says about file sharing! Finally all the good people of the Swedish antipiracy agency and their good Masters in the west can breath easily again.

Soon after this travesty I am released from custody and able to return home only to discover that they have ceased just about all of my electronic equipment. Even my keyboard, my microphone, two TFT flat screens and a multitude of cables. I immediately understand that especially the microphone will yield important information that will help bring me to justice. They had found the ACTUAL "smoking keyboard"!

On Thursday the 1st of June some of the smoke clears

Apparently the take down has been orchestrated by the MPAA lobbying the US department of foreign affairs to in their turn put pressure on the Swedish department of foreign affairs. This result in those representatives for the Swedish authorities of justice visits the US. Here they are told that there has to be a final solution to the pirate bay problem, they also informs the Swedish delegates how such a solution should be implemented.

Upon returning to Sweden the Swedish minister of justice, Thomas Bodström, is informed about the situation and in short he acts in a way that is way outside his sphere of legal influence, ignoring the separation of powers and affectively, through his secretary of the state, ORDERS the police and attorneys office to take action against The Piratebay even though both the police and the attorneys office had already told him that they lacked the legal grounds to launch such an investigation.