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https://torrentfreak.com/how-hollywood-caught-the-uks-most-prolific-movie-pirates-151227/
Following a three year investigation by Hollywood-backed anti-piracy group the Federation Against Copyright Theft, last week five of the UK's most prolific movie pirates were sentenced in the West Midlands.
[...] "Over a number of years the groups illegally released online more than 2,500 films including Argo, the Avengers and Skyfall," FACT said in a statement.
Speaking at Wolverhampton Crown Court, FACT prosecutor David Groome said that the men had gone to great lengths to avoid being detected. But was that really the case and just how easy was it to track them down?
[... One pirate,] Baker92 had been a member of another release group DTRG, FACT again turned to Equifax. Presuming the '92' in his nickname related to his birth year, FACT searched for any person named Baker born in 1992 with an association to [a girl he gave a shoutout to] called Ria. This led FACT – and the police – to Reece Baker's front door.
[... Another pirate,] Cooperman666 was also an encoder for release group ANALOG and in their NFO files a Live.com email address was listed for contact. However, that same email address was also used for a Facebook account held in the name of Ben Cooper. That page revealed he lived in Wolverhampton and was born in 1981.
Same techniques that were used to find Dread Pirate Roberts of Silk Road. Do we really need global surveillance, or are these guys just low hanging fruit?
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday December 28 2015, @01:31PM
Law enforcement kept using data from credit rating agencies. If you have nothing to hide, why do you care about privacy? Because there's so much data being accumulated that anyone can find any patterns in it that they want to. If people keep looking for connections, they'll eventually find them somewhere. And all this data is being accumulated in secret. You have no control over it and don't even know what's being collected. You have no idea if it's accurate or wrong. If it is wrong, an individual has little chance of getting a corporation to change anything, and even if they do, changes don't seem to last. We know about the credit reporting agencies, but there are other vast databases being collected of personal information by corporations which have no accountability and have no reason to keep the data accurate.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 28 2015, @04:33PM
They have at least one reason for keeping your information accurate: inaccurate data is less valuable.
The difficulty is that with so many secret databases, it is difficult to reliably poison the well. The best you can do is have many conflicting identities. But even then, they will find patterns (because people are creatures of habit)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 28 2015, @06:38PM
If they have any of my data at all, I would prefer that it is horribly inaccurate precisely because that is less valuable for them.
And I think you're overestimating them. They aren't all-knowing and can't use magical tools to find every inconsequential pattern that might or might not exist.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SanityCheck on Monday December 28 2015, @10:46PM
What they lack in accuracy they make up for in volume :)