A Canadian tech activist has been acquitted of all five charges against him, according to Jesse Brown, a Toronto-based journalist, who has been following the case for months and attended the verdict hearing on Tuesday. The full legal decision has not yet been published.

The case dates back to 2010 when the City of Toronto hosted a two-day meeting of the G20 heads of government. As security preparations were underway, a 37-year-old Canadian geek named Byron Sonne made a point of examining, testing, analyzing, and pointing out holes in the entire security apparatus. He posted photos of police perimeters and deployments online and eventually was arrested and kept in jail for almost a year.

Sonne’s interest in security has always been public; he was a prominent member of the Toronto Area Security Klatch and the city’s Hacklab. Since 2001, he has taken action to provoke law enforcement and to point out flaws in the Canadian government’s “security theater” by uploading and downloading various controversial texts on BitTorrent, including Mein Kampf, Das Kapital, books by various conspiracy-bent authors, and a book called the Guide to Home and Recreational Use of High Explosives. Sonne also acquired a restricted firearms licence and a private investigator’s licence.

As Toronto Life put it in a profile last year: “[Sonne’s] plan: engage in borderline illegal activities, attract the attention of law enforcement and establish proof of the limits of Canadian freedom.”

But by fall 2009, when provoking law enforcement and intelligence agencies to take notice of him didn’t yield an adequate response, Sonne decided to up his game by publicly teaching others how to listen in on unencrypted emergency channel communications. He also stored fertilizer that could be used to construct bombs (but wasn't), and owned rocket fuel, among other actions. Sonne’s obsession has come with a personal price; he and his wife divorced during the two-year ordeal.