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Sealed evidence from the Byron Sonne trial

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:23:43 +0000

Denise Balkisoon, who did a great job covering the Byron Sonne trial writes, "If you're not tired of G20 hacker/accused bomber Byron Sonne yet, the details of his pre-trial are now no longer under publication ban. I'm doing two posts on Open File with details, this is the first. Includes the police statement as to why they lied about his jaywalking to get his ID: 'If he didn't do anything wrong, why wouldn't he give me his name?,' said officer Euane Simon. 'An ordinary person would not be that defensive.'

Sonne, of course, was Toronto's "G20 hacker," a security expert whose life was destroyed by Toronto cops and the Canadian prosecutor when he pointed out the stupidity of the $1.2B G20 security theater.

Witness: Officer Irvin Albrecht, forensic identification officer
Albrecht presented videos and photos from the search of Sonne’s then-home at 58 Elderwood Drive. He noted, among other things, “computer hacker convention passes” on lanyards. He also noted a “suspected homemade detonator,” a device that figured highly in Sonne’s two denials of bail.
“How was that identified as such?” asked Peter Copeland, another of Sonne’s lawyers.
Albrecht said that he identified the “detonator” during his initial walk through the scene with a Sergeant Gibson. He also “came across similar looking items” in his later reading.
Later, Gavin Edison of the Centre for Forensic Sciences identified the “suspected homemade detonator” as a thermocouple, otherwise known as a fancy thermometer.
Witness: Corporal Richard Plume, RCMP
Searched Sonne’s parents cottage in Midland. He turned the compressed air “potato cannons” that earned Sonne a dangerous weapons charge over to the Guns and Gangs task force. Plume and others shot wadded up paper towels out of the cannons in the Guns and Gangs parking lot.

What we couldn't say about the Byron Sonne trial, Part I (Thanks, Denise!)

Byron Sonne is an innocent man

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:23:39 +0000

Twitter's #freebyron hashtag is alive with the news that Byron Sonne, the Toronto-area security expert who was incarcerated and treated as a terrorist for pointing out and making fun of the security flaws in the $1.2B security scheme for the Toronto G20 summit, has been found Not Guilty on all counts.

A moment of sanity from the Canadian judicial system, and all it cost was Sonne's marriage, house, and freedom.

Here's our earlier Sonne pieces.

#freebyron

Byron Sonne quizzed over saved tweets, goat avatar

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 00:08:14 +0000

Denise sez, "Update on the trial of Byron Sonne, arrested in Toronto on explosives charges in advance of the G20 in June, 2010. This week, the Crown pulled up information off of Sonne's harddrives, including tweets from Clay Shirky and Oxblood Ruffin, 50-year-old U.S. military manuals and photos of goats. Much time was spent discussing why Sonne used a goat as his username/avatar."

On Monday, Nadeau also pressed Ouelette for his personal understanding of why there were photos of goats (one labeled “drunk goat”) on Sonne’s hard drive, and why the accused had used “Goatmaster” and “Toronto Goat” as his online usernames. Peter Copeland, one of Sonne’s lawyers, objected, saying that Ouelette wasn’t an expert on acronyms. Spies decided to hear the argument as “voir dire,” meaning she will decide later if it’s admissible as evidence. So, Ouelette opined that “Goat,” stood for “Greatest of All Time,” based on his knowledge of hockey, nicknames, and Wayne Gretzky.

Miles to go: Byron Sonne trial Continues (Thanks, Denise!)

Was the G20 hacker a mad bomber, or a model rocketry hobbyist with a nice garden?

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 14:28:11 +0000

The strange, farcical trial of Byron Sonne continues (here are earlier installments). Sonne is a Toronto hacker and security researcher who was arrested during the G20, with much attendant press about the "fact" that he had been planning to make bombs in connection with the event.

Sonne was left in jail for nearly a year before his hearings began, and his charges were recharacterised as "possessing explosive materials" and "counseling the indictable offense of mischief not committed."

Now the "explosive materials" question is being addressed in court. Sonne had a lab in his basement, and he was a gardener. He possessed many substances that a "bomb expert" from Defence Research and Development Canada called "precursors" to making explosives. They are also normal gardening substances, and/or the sort of thing that a model rocketry hobbyist (as Sonne was -- he'd been a member of the Canadian Association of Rocketry) would keep in neatly labelled vessels in his basement.

No one disputes that Sonne had a lab in his basement, stocked with glassware and neatly labelled containers (see photos here). There was potassium permanganate, potassium nitrate, ammonium nitrate, iron oxide and zinc oxide. There was stearine, copper sulfate, urea, hydrogen peroxide and aluminum powder, as well as dextrin, sulfamic acid, hexachloroethane, charcoal, potassium silicate and sodium bicarbonate. Sonne had plastic bags full of wax shavings and PVC shavings, and a container of hexamine tablets next to his camp stove. There was acetone, methyl hydrate and hydrochloric acid in his garage. In his furnace room, he had an electrochemical setup where he seemed to be turning potassium chloride into potassium chlorate, a shiny white crystal that is, Anderson said, a well-known ingredient in improvised explosives like TATP (triacetone triperoxide) and HMTD (hexamethylene triperoxide diamlene).
Most of these chemicals have multiple uses. Urea and ammonium nitrate are fertilizers, and police photographed stacks of seeds from Martha Stewart Living. “That’s the difficulty with a lot of this,” Anderson said. “It can be done with ordinary kitchen stuff.” Some have no explosive properties at all. Copper sulfate can be used to grow “beautiful blue crystals,” beakers of which were found during the search.
Anderson said that none of the chemicals had been combined—what he saw were “precursors,” not a bomb. Still, the expert was sober, pointing out that there were enough precursors in the Forest Hill home to make eight to 10 kilos of explosives, enough to “blow apart the back of a bus.”

Byron Sonne: the thin line between terrorist and gardener (Thanks, Denise!)