Warez raids in Europe hit close to Wikileaks

Police in Europe shut down 49 servers and detained 10 people in 13 countries in a coordinated raid against an online movie-pirating network, according to a statement today from the Belgian prosecutor's office.

In Sweden, police raided seven locations including one in a suburb of Stockholm containing servers used by file-sharing website The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks, the whisteblowing website.

More: AFP, and AP.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Church

Yeah, good luck with that.

Also, in totally unrelated news, we’re in the end stages of ACTA negotiations.
Anonymous

http://www.mediafire.com/file/nhzzlmhtmb2/nocopy-vd.avi [63mb] Short video about the origins of those targeted in these raids.
hadlock

How on earth do you detain 10 people in 13 countries?
- travtastic
  
  Hit them with a taser running across the border.
- hungryjoe
  
  Sounds kind of like a dead baby joke, doesn’t it?
EH

Actually, they didn’t hit close at all. I mean really, (implied) guilt by association via customers of the same ISP? I hate when people I normally agree with use FoxNews logic.
Alex_M

I’m not even sure ‘raid’ is the correct term. According to Swedish press and statements made by the staff, the police went to PRQ (host of wikipeaks and TPB) wanting to know who was behind some IP addresses, was informed that PRQ doesn’t keep that information, and apparently left with little more than a few e-mail addresses. Nothing was seized as evidence.

Seems the Swedish end of the ‘sting’ was fairly minimal.
littlerunninggag

From the article:

A Swedish police coordinator Paul Pinter said the raid against PRQ had nothing to do “either with The Pirate Bay or with WikiLeaks.”
ben

Aha! You’ll never catch me, coppers!
pridkett

Movie piracy is different than Warez and confusing the two terms just causes problems. The movie and music industries have, at least recently, been a lot more aggressive about taking these actions than software companies.
Anonymous

No one can stop warez groups. When one group is down , another is set up . Moreover it seems that the safest place to host warez stuff is Asia , especially in Hongkong !!
prodigous

These raids weren’t targeting torrent sites or WikiLeaks. The only targets seem to be a direct download warez ring.
TPB was down for maintenance at the time and everyone is jumping to conclusions.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-and-others-not-affected-by-warez-raids-100909/