Pirate Bay Founder Denies Hacking Charges in Court
Posted: 29 May 2013
Early April, prosecutor Henry Olin of the International Public Prosecution Office in Stockholm announced that Gottfrid Svartholm had been charged with several hacking related offenses including serious fraud, attempted aggravated fraud, and aiding attempted aggravated fraud.
The charges relate to the hacking of Logica, a Swedish IT company working with local tax authorities. Much of the prosecution’s evidence was obtained from a computer seized from Gottfrid when he was detained last year in Cambodia.
Last week the Pirate Bay founder and a 36-year-old from Dalarna went on trial in the Stockholm District Court and after a fairly quiet first few days more information is now coming out of the court room.
Gottfrid denies the charges and presented with evidence found on his computer he said that someone else must have gained access while he was in Cambodia. He denied fleeing there to avoid his Pirate Bay-related jail sentence and said the move was simply because he was “no longer a big fan of Sweden.”
“Both of the computers were lab computers for software development,” Gottfrid said, adding that they were accessible by others both physically at his home and remotely via the Internet.
“I had a fairly large apartment and a lot of people have been there, so it is possible. But personally, I think it happened by remote control,” he said.
Dressed in a blue shirt the 28-year-old said he has no interest in mainframe computers such as Logica’s, describing them as “big and boring stuff in boring places.”
Prosecutor Henry Olin presented chat logs in which he claimed that Gottfrid and the as-yet unnamed 36-year-old communicated, but that assertion was rejected.
“It’s not me who wrote that,” Gottfrid told the court, having previously noted that his co-defendant is just a casual acquaintance.
The Pirate Bay founder agreed that he had occasionally used an online alias mentioned by the prosecution but said that the same name had also been used by up to half a dozen other people.
“He is not credible,” prosecutor Henrik Olin told Swedish media during a break in proceedings. “If you look at the person Gottfrid Svartholm is, why would he have allowed others to use his computer to that extent?”
The case continues.