After being charged with instances of hacking earlier this month, Gottfrid Svartholm will now go on trial in May. The Pirate Bay co-founder denies the charges and says that evidence found on his computer was placed there remotely via the Internet. In the meantime Gottfrid's mother Kristina is questioning why authorities are placing so much emphasis on the effect the claimed hacking has had on allegedly vulnerable people.

Earlier this month 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 public heard of the charges via a press statement on April 16 but Gottfrid discovered the news only after watching TV in his Mariefred prison cell later that day. According to ComputerSweden, Gottfrid and his alleged accomplices will now go on trial starting May 20.

At this stage it appears that Gottfrid will plead “not guilty” to what is emerging as a sophisticated hack, between January 2010 and April 2012, 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. The Pirate Bay co-founder says that the information was placed there via the Internet but he won’t name the culprit out of fear of reprisals.

According to the indictment, Gottfrid and accomplices first gained access to an FTP server on which scripts were run to obtain such things as password lists. These were subsequently cracked and the information was used to gain access to more systems. It is claimed that the attackers took steps to hide their identities by using compromised wireless networks and relay servers around the world.

According to authorities around 16GB of confidential data was copied by the hackers and the transfer of such a large amount of data was one of the factors that led to their discovery. But it’s the nature of that data and the way it is being presented to the media by Swedish authorities that’s causing concern for Gottfrid’s mother Kristina Svartholm.

“The prosecutor has claimed in the media that the hacking of Logica, and thus the access to information emanating from the Swedish tax authorities, has caused worries among people who live with protected identities. Some of them have even felt compelled to move from one place to another, according to the prosecutor,” Kristina told TorrentFreak.

“I have recently been approached by people who have told me that this simply can’t be true. Personally I don’t know much about how the system works, but since one of these persons has a protected identity him-/herself, I find it less plausible that I am totally misinformed.”

Kristina says that her sources report that there’s no possibility that obtaining information from the tax authorities would be harmful to protected individuals in the way the prosecutor has claimed, since their identities are protected both within and outside the system.

“What was hacked and published on the Internet were so-called personal numbers (not to be mixed up with security numbers), numbers that are public in themselves. Some of them did belong to people that were protected, and other numbers did not. Anyhow, the numbers couldn’t be used for finding out the identities and whereabouts of anyone.”

Kristina believes that if this scenario is true, the bleak picture now being painted by the authorities is the cause of anxiety among people. She adds that one of the companies involved reported to the police that the publicity being given to the data breach could be more harmful than the hacking itself.

“My question is why the prosecutor wants to give this picture of severe damage caused to individuals, a picture quite different from what my sources have told me. Unfortunately it is well on line with what was communicated to the Cambodian authorities last year when the Swedish prosecutor asked for their help to pick up Gottfrid,” Kristina notes.

“These documents haven’t become public until now. They show that the Swedish authorities presented daunting ‘facts’ to Cambodia about Gottfrid. No wonder that they placed him in their anti-terrorist locals in Phnom Penh. However, I can’t see much of that information reflected in the prosecution presented two weeks ago.”

Finally as further reading, researchers at Lund University, Sweden, have been commenting on the hacks and subsequent prosecution. Marcin de Kaminski asks what lessons can be learned and Håkan Hydén asks whether the $4,200 Gottfrid is alleged to have transfered from a Danish bank amounts to aggravated fraud and “abusing the public trust.”