Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (52 page)

NP:
Where was he when the police arrived?

JD:
He was in Sheffield at his student accommodation. It was early in the morning. He was just getting ready to go to classes and some police knocked on his door … there was police from the City of London, and two American agents. We assume it was ICE agents. They weren’t present when Richard was being questioned. I don’t know why they were there, but they didn’t come in on any of the questioning.

NP:
So they took him down to the police station.

JD:
In Sheffield, yes.

NP:
I was watching an interview that Richard did with
The Guardian
in which he talked about how he asked if he should have a solicitor present and they brushed him off by saying it’d take too long.

JD:
Yeah … they said to him it’s going to take a few hours to get one here. Because they said that, and because he had no previous dealings with the police, he didn’t ask for a solicitor. And he wanted to get to his classes. He didn’t want to be late.

NP:
What’s your understanding of what was said during the questioning?

JD:
Well I have the transcript of the police interview … it wasn’t a long interview. It was about forty minutes … [They said] they were arresting him under copyright, designs, and patents offenses. They said the website is streaming films and TV, and that’s infringing copyright legislation, so therefore the money you’re making is effectively money laundering; it’s the proceeds of your criminal activity. That’s why you’re being arrested. They asked him about the website, when he made it. They asked him did anybody else help him with the website. They asked him about how he managed the website, and if he generated an income from it. They asked him how it technically worked. It was just links on the
website, there was no copyrighted content … they asked him how people would go on it, select a link, would be directed to YouTube or some other video sites. They asked him about how it gained popularity … they asked him more technical stuff about the website, where the servers were. No servers were in America. He told them it was all his own work, nobody helped him. He did it as a hobby. That’s about it really … he was actually in tears for most of the interview. I didn’t find that out until I got this transcript. I was a bit annoyed about that.

NP:
How old was he at this time?

JD:
He was questioned in 2010, so he was 22 … the police were also here at my house at the same time questioning me. They probably had this address down for Richard as well you see.

NP:
So simultaneously to the police knocking on Richard’s door at his digs they’re knocking on your door?

JD:
Yes … same time, early in the morning. I wasn’t going to work that day because we had the joiners here. They were taking out the staircase and putting new stairs in. They came and I was really worried and thought Richard had been in an accident. That’s the first thing I thought when I saw these police. It was about half 6 or 7 in the morning. It was dark. Anyway, they said they wanted to speak to me about a website that Richard had.

NP:
Under what circumstances did Richard finally get released?

JD:
When they finished questioning me I just sent him a text telling him to come home or he texted me and said he was coming home, and so he did. Nobody mentioned extradition at this point. That wasn’t even something that entered our minds. So I just said, “Don’t worry about it, Richard. We’ll get a solicitor, we’ll sort it all out.” He was told that he was on bail and that he would have to go back to the City of London Police Station, which is where those police came from, six months later, which he did. We both went there.

NP:
What happened when you went down to London six months later in May of 2011?

JD:
It was just to go to the police station to answer to the bail. Richard by now had got a solicitor who also knew nothing about extradition. He got us somebody to meet Richard at the police station … he went in with Richard, and then quickly came out and said the criminal investigation in the UK had been dropped. I felt an immediate sigh of relief, but then in the next sentence he said, but we’ve got this extradition warrant instead, and we have to go straight to the courts. That happened quickly. Richard was put straight into a police car and taken to the court. I had to go and find my way to the court, and that’s the first we heard about the mention of extradition.

NP:
So with no warning, all of a sudden you’re in a UK court fighting extradition.

JD:
Yes. Richard was put straight into a cell at the police station. He was locked up. I had to make my way there and the lawyer said that a barrister would meet
me there … I had to be there for 2 and I don’t think the barrister came ‘til about 4. Richard was locked up all this time so I couldn’t have any contact with him.

NP:
I’m guessing your lawyer would have had to scrabble around to find a barrister because he didn’t even know he was going to need one.

JD:
Exactly, yes. While Richard was locked up and I was waiting to go to into this court, loads of people were there waiting for the same purpose, not to go America but to Europe … I went into the court to wait Richard’s turn. They just keep coming in, one after the other … they were all just being processed through … and I was just thinking, oh my God, this is going to happen to Richard next. We didn’t get any information. Nobody gave us a leaflet about what happens if you’re given an extradition warrant. I only knew what I could see going on there. The fact was everybody was getting their extradition requests rubber-stamped.

When Richard came into the court there was a prosecutor there for America and this barrister that we had. Of course, she knew nothing either. Nobody knew about the case because we didn’t know there was a case. The prosecutors wanted Richard to be kept in prison, so they were arguing for that. It was really terrifying because they were so nasty. Because Richard had got exams the following week, and we’d told all this to the barrister woman. She managed to get bail for Richard, but he had to go in prison overnight because they wanted his passport. We didn’t go to London with a passport, it was here at home, and they wanted some cash as well. Then it was 5 o’clock, and the court was closing. We couldn’t physically get the money and get the passport by 5 o’clock when we didn’t even go into the court until 4, so Richard had to go to Wandsworth Prison. Luckily my sister lives in London so I was able to give her a call. I went to her house and then the next day we got the money and I phoned home and got my partner to get the passport. None of it was straightforward.

NP:
I can imagine; Chesterfield’s one hundred fifty miles away from London.

JD:
You have to take the passport to a local police station, and they have to contact the prison. But the trouble is I was trying to do this at 5 o’clock after Richard had gone off to Wandsworth Prison. They make them sit in a van for hours outside, they take hours to process them into the prison, and until they’re actually processed into the prison and moved onto their computer system, they wouldn’t accept the passport. My partner … he was in Worksop [a town sixteen miles from Chesterfield] at the time, and the police were like, “We don’t know how to do this. We can’t take your passport.” It was just hopeless, the whole thing. But by the next day, we got that sorted, and he was able to come out in the afternoon.

The other thing was they didn’t know what bail conditions to impose on him. The judge was like, “We’ve got the money, we’ve got the passport, what else can we do to him?” The barrister said we could say that he mustn’t access the Internet, but then the judge was saying he’s got exams the next week, he’s at university, so we can’t do that, can we? And how could we police that anyway, he could just go in an Internet café. So Richard had to tap on the glass, because he was behind this glass wall in the court, to get somebody to come over so that
he could make suggestions to them about his bail. He just said, “You could tell me not to access the TV Shack website”—which he’d already taken down anyway—and “You could tell me not to buy any new domain names.” So he chose his own bail restrictions because they didn’t know what to do. It was funny. Well it would have been funny if it hadn’t been so frightening.

NP:
So now he’s back studying at university and you’re fighting extradition, which is just a ridiculous thing because he’s not committed any crime that anyone’s interested in prosecuting him for in the UK, and it’s arguable that he’s committed no crime at all.

JD:
Yes, that’s right. He never went to America. America is claiming jurisdiction over somebody who has never set foot in their country. They don’t allow it to happen to their own citizens. We can’t do it to them. I have a freedom of information request which shows that not one American has ever been extradited to the UK for something that they’d done in America. And the UK has never asked for an extradition of an American for something that they’ve done in America. So it’s mad.

NP:
What’s the process to fight the extradition? And where are you at with it right now?

JD:
Well we’ve just received a date for the appeal in December … the main argument is that Richard’s website operated in the same way as the TV Links website … and the TV Links case was thrown out of court. It was dismissed … it was thrown out because they said that linking to any content is not a crime basically.

NP:
As I understand it, they were claiming the difference with Richard’s case was that he was curating content?

JD:
No, they didn’t say that actually. In fact it was quite a cock up at the court … we had a few hearings where we presented the arguments through October and November of 2011 … in order to be extradited the alleged crime must be a crime in both countries. We were trying to prove that it is not a crime in the UK. If we had won that argument, then Richard couldn’t be extradited. At that court hearing the judge was saying yes, you’ve got a good, strong argument. And so was the prosecutor. We had another hearing booked, because there’s other arguments that you put forward like human rights …

The next court appearance, the night before we were going to London we got a late submission from the other side. When you get a document through, you have to read it and you’re meant to rebut it, provide a response. But it came to us at something like 7 o’ clock at night; we were going to get on a train at 5 in the morning. Normally we would look at these documents for a week or so and with the solicitor write a response. I was really cross about this … I just sent a bit of a ranty email saying, “Why are we getting this crap? It’s full of inaccuracies. The prosecution clearly don’t have the technical knowledge to understand what it’s all about.”

The next morning, we got to London, I was still mad about this, because we had to do a very quick response to it. The barrister came and he said, “Oh, I’ve
sent your email to the prosecution barrister, and he’s decided not to submit that document.” It was rubbish anyway. We weren’t afraid for him to submit it, just annoyed that it was sent so late. But he’d decided not to [submit it]. Because of that, the barrister said let’s leave it now as we left it last time, which is when the judge said we’ve got a good strong argument. We still had some other material to send in, but he said let’s leave it. I didn’t want to leave it. I wanted to carry on because I wanted it done good and proper, so that they wouldn’t be able to come back. But because he felt that the judge and the prosecutor were agreeing that we had a good argument, he thought we would win it, so we didn’t then submit this extra stuff … but then it all changed. Six weeks later the judge changed his mind. So we have to appeal against that decision, and this is the date that we’re waiting for, the appeal.

NP:
I presume this is all costing an incredible amount of time and money …

JD:
Well Richard has legal aid, because he’s a student, so we don’t have to pay legal costs. We’ve had to pay for a couple of things, like we had a video made to explain to the judge how linking works. Because you get judges who are not technically literate … there’s been the costs associated with traveling up and down to London quite a lot. That’s expensive.

NP:
And I understand that you had to temporarily give up work.

JD:
Yes, I was off work for about six months as soon as this started happening.

NP:
This is so chilling, because what Richard’s done, putting links on a website, if America is successful in this case, the way it could be extrapolated will mean that virtually anyone that’s ever put a website up could be extradited and/or subject to similar prosecution.

JD:
I’ve checked the American Department of Justice website, I’ve checked ICE’s website, I’ve checked the British Home Office website, they all have links on, and what do they say? We are not responsible for any content on any third party links … which is what Richard said on his website. Because when you go to a link on somebody’s website, you leave that website and go to elsewhere—don’t you? You don’t stay on that website. The content that you link to isn’t on your website. It’s like if you have an email that somebody sends you with a link on, if you click on the link, you get sent somewhere else. It’s not lodging on your email is it? So yes, it’s worrying, isn’t it, certainly?

NP:
Do you have a sense that what you’re fighting isn’t just for Richard? It’s for thousands of people just like Richard, and also for sanity to reign on the Internet.

JD:
I’ve had to educate myself more about the Internet and about extradition law as well. In the course of that I found out all about SOPA and PIPA and all that. So, yes, it is a very important issue isn’t it? And I think you’re right by saying if this is allowed to happen, then there are implications for many others worldwide, and for the Internet. So yeah, it’s very important, but obviously I do have to put Richard first. He’s only a little fish really. I’m sure they’ve got bigger fish to fry than a little lad from Derbyshire.