The Metropolitan Police claimed yesterday that they had arrested prominent Lulz Security and AnonOps member Topiary. The initial report claimed that a 19-year-old man was arrested in the Shetland Islands and was being flown down to London for questioning. That report has now been adjusted, saying that he was in fact an 18-year-old man. But there's a lot of speculation—some rather bombastic, other more reserved—that, however old this man actually is, there's one thing he isn't: Topiary.

Attempts to dox people—find out their real identities and publish their "documents" on the Web—have long been a tool in Anonymous' arsenal. Many people, whether they be animal abusers who've posted videos to YouTube or Sony executives and their families, have found themselves doxed after provoking Anonymous' wrath. Turn about is fair play, and so many groups who oppose Anonymous, and its high profile spin-off, Lulz Security, have attempted to dox members of that collective.

Topiary is one of those previously doxed, most extensively by a group calling itself LulzSec Exposed. In their view, Topiary is a 23-year-old Swedish male, with two videos—a two-year-old piece of Swedish TV about Anonymous' protests against Scientologists, and a Skype interview with Topiary about denial-of-service attacks performed on the Westboro Baptist Church—cited as particularly compelling evidence.

An IRC transcript, in which he discusses a doxing attempt made on him, appears particularly compelling: he does nothing to refute the claim that he has a Swedish accent, and explicitly indicates that he's trying to pass himself off as a British citizen who apparently also goes by the name of Topiary online.

So if the doxings are accurate, then the British police have made quite a mistake by picking up this Shetlander and not Swedish Topiary.

It's certainly possible that they are accurate; at least some doxings in the past have been accurate. Ryan Cleary, the UK teenager arrested in June for his involvement with Lulz Security and Anonymous, had been doxed the previous month; the subsequent arrest corroborates the facts released at the time.

But the track record is far from consistent. Sabu, another prominent member of Lulz Security and AnonOps, has been repeatedly doxed, most recently being named as "Hugo Carvalho". Initially, at least, he appeared to play along with this doxing on Twitter, admitting that he'd been identified but claiming that he had nothing to fear, as the Portuguese government wouldn't extradite him anyway. But then a person—apparently the "real" Hugo Carvalho—contacted media outlets to tell them that he wasn't Sabu at all, and had been framed.

Did the police get the wrong guy? Consensus opinion is that, well, there is no consensus. As Graham Cluley of Sophos Security wrote:

If you ask me, is the man they arrested in the Shetland Islands is Topiary, another hacker (either working in league with Anonymous/LulzSec or opposing them), or entirely innocent.. my simple answer is I don't know.

In other words, every option remains open, and the authenticity of the dox remains unknown. The evidence that he's Swedish is far from compelling, not least because the accents in the Westboro Baptist Church interview (among others that Topiary has performed) is plainly not Swedish, and has more than a hint of a Scottish lilt to it. In spite of the arrest, LulzSec Exposed are standing by their claims, saying that Swedish Topiary tried to trick them into thinking he was from the UK, but they didn't fall for it—the also claimed once more that the voices in the videos match.

There are also indications that Topiary is indeed in hot water: he cleared out his Twitter account except for one final, solitary tweet: "You cannot arrest an idea." A tweet that could well be interpreted as an admission that while the game may be up for Topiary, he hoped others would continue Anonymous' work.

The Swedish Topiary doxing was widely publicized at the time, and one would hope that the police investigating Lulz Security and Anonymous would know about the Swedish claims and wouldn't be caught out so easily.

But given the group's propensity for anonymity, and—at least in Sabu's case—a habit of creating false trails to mislead would-be doxers, the facts remain elusive. The mystery of Topiary's identity isn't over yet.