Gottfrid Svartholm

Gottfrid Svartholm
Svartholm in 2009
Born
Per Gottfrid Svartholm Warg

(1984-10-17) 17 October 1984 (age 40)
Stockholm, Sweden
NationalitySwedish
Other namesanakata
OccupationComputer specialist
Known forCo-founding The Pirate Bay
Political partyClassical Liberal[1]

Per Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (born 17 October 1984), alias anakata, is a Swedish computer specialist, known as the former co-owner of the web hosting company PRQ and co-founder of the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay together with Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde.

Parts of an interview with Svartholm commenting on the May 2006 police raid of The Pirate Bay are featured in Good Copy Bad Copy and Steal This Film. He is a main focus of the documentary TPB AFK.

In May 2013, WikiLeaks said Svartholm Warg had worked with the organization for the 2010 release of Collateral Murder, the helicopter cockpit gunsight video of a July 2007 airstrike by U.S. forces in Baghdad.[2] According to WikiLeaks, Svartholm served as technical consultant and managed infrastructure critical to the organization.[3][4] He was also listed as part of the “decryption and transmission team” and credited for “networking.”[5] Svartholm was one of several Pirate Bay associates who did work for other Wikileaks endeavors.[5] One of Svartholm's companies had previously hosted WikiLeaks' computers.[6]

On 27 November 2013, he was extradited to Denmark, where he was charged with infiltrating the Danish social security database, driver's licence database, and the shared IT system used in the Schengen zone. Awaiting his court trial, he was being held in solitary confinement.[citation needed] A court trial ended on 31 October 2014, and he was found guilty by the jury and sentenced to three and a half years in prison. The sentence was appealed immediately, but the judges, fearing that he might try to evade his sentence, ordered that he be held in confinement until the appeal court trial date.[7]

After spending three years in different prisons in both Sweden and Denmark, he was eventually released on 29 September 2015. According to his mother, he expressed a desire ‘to get back to his developmental work within IT’ upon his release.[8]

  1. ^ Johan Arvidsson (4 March 2009). "Peter Sunde vill förändra miljöpartiet" (in Swedish). Nyheter24. Archived from the original on 10 March 2009.
  2. ^ "Prosecution and prison documents for Pirate-Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (alias Anakata)". WikiLeaks.org. 19 May 2013. Retrieved 16 December 2013.
  3. ^ WikiLeaks (press release), (29 November 2013). "WikiLeaks consultant Gottfrid Svartholm Warg extraditet from Sweden after alleged access to NSA contractor CSC". WikiLeaks.org. Retrieved 1 January 2016.
  4. ^ "Pirate Bay cofounder reportedly held in solitary confinement". The Daily Dot. 12 December 2013. Retrieved 14 March 2022.
  5. ^ a b "Pirate Bay Founder Helped Wikileaks On Several Fronts * TorrentFreak". Retrieved 22 July 2022.
  6. ^ Protalinski, Emil (11 September 2012). "The Pirate Bay Co-Founder Gottfrid Svartholm Held for Hacking". TNW | Insider. Retrieved 14 March 2022.
  7. ^ "Dom i hackersag: Tre et halvt års fængsel til svenske Warg – danske JT får sin pc med hjem" (in Danish). Version2. 31 October 2014.
  8. ^ "Last Pirate Bay co-founder released from prison". The Guardian. 29 September 2015. Retrieved 20 April 2016.