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How Much Can the Resurrected Pirate Bay be Trusted?

posted by janrinok on Thursday February 12 2015, @02:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-much-can-you-trust-anyone-online? dept.

sigma writes:

Several people have been warning users to avoid The Pirate Bay, due to CloudFlare integration and potential FBI IP bugs. There are even suggestions that the FBI has been involved in the site's somewhat mysterious rebirth.

Nobody knows who really runs The Pirate Bay, but the old moderation team were all removed as part of the relaunch. The Pirate Bay now allows people to 'report' malicious torrents instead of having a moderation team.

Some claim the FBI re-launched The Pirate Bay or had connections to the owners, implanting IP bugs on all torrent’s uploaded for investigation. The Pirate Bay has denied these accusations, claiming CloudFlare is only a temporary measure to help with the influx of traffic on the torrenting site.

CloudFlare is a cloud server provider, but is based in the US. Many privacy advocates claim CloudFlare is not a safe tool, due to the potential warrant-less searches from the FBI and other US agencies. On the topic of working with the FBI, The Pirate Bay has not responded, but TorrentFreak claims the accusations are "complete nonsense" but said that "general security concerns of using a US-based service are legitimate".

What does SoylentNews think? Is it wise to stay away?

 
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  • (Score: 1) by number11 on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:39PM

    by number11 (1170) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:39PM (#144349)

    If the FBI relaunched the piratebay website, wouldn't they be legally restricted to only hosting copyright free material?

    Suppose you download an album with copyright protection off of the pirate bay. Can the FBI charge you, if they were the ones hosting it? Couldn't a defense lawyer tear that apart?

    Even if a defense lawyer couldn't, wouldn't the FBI be legally just a liable as the downloader?

    Since when did the FBI (or other 3-letter agencies) overly worry about whether what they were doing was legal? They can always get John Yoo to write them a legal opinion saying that it is legal. And what makes you think they'd admit to running TPB? Once they know who you are, they can always find some other way to identify you, that's called "parallel construction".

    And the copyright liability is a civil matter, not a criminal one. Civil means the copyright holder would have to sue them. And (in most cases) guess what, you can't sue the feds unless they first give you permission to sue them (that's called "sovereign immunity"). Good luck with that.

    No, they're pretty much above the law. Laws are for the little people, not them.