British Police Duped by LulzSec Into Arresting the Wrong Guy? | Hacker News Reader

British Police Duped by LulzSec Into Arresting the Wrong Guy?

dailytech.com

136 pointsnextparadigms33 comments

I read this article earlier. I don't understand the following line from the chatlog:

> Topiary: better not hit me on April fool's day

is this a joke that has gone over my head, or are the logs indeed from March?

Edit: looks like I'm a fool, the logs are indeed from March and are unrelated to this incident. I thought the article was using them as proof of this incident being part of "duping" the police, but it's actually being used to show Topiary from England != Lulzsec topiary. My mistake. Will leave comment in case anyone else makes the same mistake.

Yeah, it was all a little unclear. I'm still not sure whether LS's Topiary stole the name from a troll, or a troll started using Topiary's name.

Not that it matters... In the end, it looks like the real Topiary is in a different country altogether from where the arrest was made.

Absolutely hilarious.

How long before the police discover their mistake, I wonder?

Not quite so hilarious for the person who (if this story is right) has been arrested for things he didn't do.

Better he learn what the system is like while young. With media attention on his arrest he's likely to be unmolested.

There's no alternative where he was safe, just ones where the risk wasn't realized. Now he'll know what many complacent people never realize - how fragile his life is and how easily 'evidence' against him is created as necessary.

Wasn't topiary supposedly the guy who was doing the interview during which the WBC got hacked? If so, they have his voice on tape. Certainly wasn't British. At the time I thought French, but Swedish would fit.

The slightly annoying thing is that we may never know. The real topiary is not going to reappear if they've arrested the wrong guy. The police are certainly not going to give up their arrest. And presumably they've got this guy in custody on something. So I assume they can make the charges stick. I'm sure they've arrested him under his real name for something he actually did, not topiary for being a member of Lulzsec.

The public certainly don't care. It only matters that justice appears to be done.

So it looks to me like everyone is happy (except the guy who got arrested of course).

If he's really from Shetland he wouldn't sound British. He might sound Swedish though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shetlandic

That's english with a few more words, they still sound scottish, not swedish.

From a bit of youtubing and googling the few clips I've heard are instantly recognizable as scottish, with a few words you don't understand.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shet...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij60XUvWjZY&feature=playe...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVxNxnXo7-c&playnext=1...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx5MgoL5tQ8

The UK has a phenomenal amount of dialects, they're all British though and even a Londoner can tell the difference between a Swedish accent and a British one.

British accent != accent from the UK. I doubt anyone from Northern Ireland would asociate with being thier accent called British, from either side of the political divide; and I suspect more than a few of our Scottish bretheren would object rightly or wrongly.

But to your point - a Scottish accent and a Swedish one are distinctly different.

Scotland and Shetland are both part of the British Isles, a geographic term. Scotland itself is actually part of Great Britain, an island which contain England, Wales and Scotland. Although admittedly Shetland is not.

The term British is rather malleable but check the first entry in wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britain

Yes, common usage of the term British includes the whole of the UK.

The usual problem people from Scotland and Ireland have are being called English, not British and Scots are British anyway and I never mentioned the Irish.

Finally riddle me this, what should I have used instead of British to refer to the people of the UK? Which is where I'm from I might add. As there exists no other term other than British.

The real topiary is not going to reappear if they've arrested the wrong guy

He might. Why? For the lulz, of course.

Makes one wonder if their monikers are really tightly tied to real persons. Maybe the core group uses their names interchangeably and when one of them is ousted with a raid, some one else from the group assumes the online identity.

You would make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.

Wesley?

Not all that surprising. Eventually the LulzSec people will get popped inadvertently, but they'll run law enforcement in circles for quite a while before it happens. LulzSec and Anonymous thrive on ambiguity and confusion so they can keep piling on the lies and deception. They have no need to get their story straight, just keep law enforcement in a cloud of doubt. This entire chatlog could be bullshit, a little disinfo to muddy the waters. If Swedish Topiary gets popped you release some logs revealing yourself to be Shetland Topiary trolling the Swede.

The explanation in this article seems pretty tenuous and the title could at least do with being "British police might have been duped by LulzSec into arresting the wrong person".

my 5 cents:

* the antilulzsec movement is missleading information created by lulzsec themselves

* chatlogs are just text. they do not prove anythinh

* i guess they raided the guys home not without reason...

If I were betting, I'd be with you on this, even though the reason to raid may have been deliberately planted misinformation from lulzsec.

It might be helpful to know what ISP this guy used.

Going after people running Low Orbit Ion Cannon and expecting to get top brass is... incredible wishful thinking.

I think they just need to get someone. Doesn't really matter who. Find some random gullable 13 year old wanna-be-hacker kid that ran LOIC for a while. Parade him in front of the media and judges, send him off to juvie, handshakes and bonuses for everyone involved... Police, prosecutors, media, all get to pat theselves on the back. That is what this is really about.

Which itself achieves a positive outcome, by communicating to the next gullible 13-year-old who might be thinking about doing something stupid to someone else's computer that there might be real-world consequences to it.

Assuming gullible 13-year-olds are the sort to think about the consequences before downloading an executable and clicking "run," anyway. In my experience (so this is really just anecdotal evidence), that's rarely the case, especially when it comes to politics.

The total number of script-kiddies might go down a bit. Of course there's always going to be some gullible 13-year-olds who run scripts, but the idea is to have less of them. It's more of a statistical argument than an anecdotal one.

Sad to watch them try to send another guy to jail for what they did. "No honor among thieves" came to mind.

I rather see it as highlighting a weakness in the system. Arresting someone on suspicion without evidence tying the human to the twitter account and to the actual crime is a sad state of affairs. People should be made aware that this kind of thing cam happen with little recourse for the mistakes of the police.

I don't know precisely how it works in Scotland, but presumably they had evidence sufficient to obtain a warrant for the arrest. Are you really saying the police should have to prove guilt before arresting suspects?

The police (here in Scotland or pretty much anywhere) can arrest someone on suspicion of something with pretty minimal evidence, you don't need a warrant but once you have arrested them you then have to either charge them or release them within a relatively short space of time (our rather draconian anti-terror laws which mean they can be held for weeks without charge wouldn't apply here).

It makes no sense for them to arrest him without evidence. The two options for who arrested him are local or national police.

If it were the local police why would local police on a sparsely populated island with little crime go and arrest someone and accuse them of being a hacker with no evidence knowing that he'd be out in a day? It makes no sense to do so and if you did do it you certainly wouldn't go public with the arrest knowing you had no evidence.

On the other hand if you're national police working in cyber crime out of London, to make the arrest you've got to convince someone to pay to fly two officers six hundred miles north and them and the suspect back. Given that UK police are being asked to make massive budget cuts and are under significant scrutiny (particularly the Met who would likely be heading this) because of the phone hacking, that trip isn't getting signed off without someone convincing a senior officer that there was something to it.

So the chances of there being no evidence is basically nil. The evidence they have may be misinformation, or they may have misinterpreted it, but they will have believed that this guy was involved.

Looking into this a bit more it was national police from the Met in London who carried out this arrest.

Wouldn't the analog(ue) be framing? Just because one can frame people (on-line or IRL) doesn't mean the system is flawed. It just means there are people out there willing to have someone else be the fall-person as an end, or as a distraction to buy time in order to escape (or allow the trail of evidence to tail off/go cold.)

Contrary to what the headline suggests, this is just speculation.

Or maybe Topiary's friends are trying to convince the police they got the wrong guy and get some added publicity at the same time?

More than likely. The conversation seems like a movie script. Too cut and dry; everything spelled out for the audience.

> Topiary: (as you know I stole this nickname from a troll last December, didn't work out so well)

Give me a break.

This seems likely - the "police are dumbasses" mentality, and popular image of LulzSec as clever hackers really doing it for "lulz", allow them to present stories like this -and- gain support.

Not to dismiss the possibility entirely, of course - but it is awfully consistent with their previous attempts to hide the fact that they're on a sinking ship.

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