Am I the only one tired over how TorrentFreak will say anything, related or not, to try to confirm their bias? This aid was decided on for over 5 months ago, in march 2012 (http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/574/a/94013), and it is obviously not the result of Sweden trying to get at Svartholm. But if you want to be believe it then please do...
I didn't know Sweeden gave money to Cambodia and I am glad that TorrentFreak informed me of this. Foreign aid from rich to poor countries is used in general to keep diplomatic cooperation flowing smoothly in matters of interest to the giver country.
Sweden is one of few countries that reach the United Nations goal stating that countries should give one percent of their GNP as foreign aid. According to the reports I could find it is currently the largest giver of foreign aid in the world, with regards to it's economy and population.
This wasn't spontaneous. It happens every year although the amounts changes as we see here.
I read your article and surfed around for better information, but couldn't find much. So here's a bunch of conjecture, feel free to skip it. Link me better stuff if you find any.
First, you can't go giving away other peoples money and call it 'charity', or measure it against actual charitable activity.
As far as I can tell, the 'best in the world' status relates only to the fact that they 'give' (redistribute) a higher percent of GDP than any other nation. They still sell or give arms to despots (as even your article points out). Much of their aid is in the form of government purchase of Swedish products, then given away, which surely leads to some crony backroom deals with industry leaders, as all protectionist measures do, you know, pork barrel politics.
My assumption, and the reason that it's easy to smear, is that people with power aren't angels, and taking money from locals to deliver off to some foreign land may be for reasons that are less than scrupulous or benevolent, that there is inherent conflict of interest (conditions for corruption) in every government expenditure.
Of course all such matters will be offset by very visible donations to the humanitarian effort of the day, in this case, Syria. Whatever form their aid to the 'refugees' takes there, unless it's going straight into the mouths of the needy, you'd better bet some of it will be redirected into winning the fight.
I'm not saying they did, but it is possible thay they threatened to bomb them with buckets of blue paint if they didn't get him.
We currently don't know, and saying either way at this point doesn't mean much. We need some actual proof.
Or, in other words, you can pretty much make up anything and flag it as a possible reason. A common ploy in propaganda which causes the same affect, if you if add a disclaimer that 'we just don't know'
Nobody is claiming that Svartholm alone was worth $60M to Sweden. Still, is it equally "obvious" to you that not even a tiny fraction of the lump amount was allocated to "strengthen the relationships between the immigration departments" of the two countries? If you want to believe it then please do...
I thought that was exactly what the article tried to imply.
From the article: "But today, in another one of those unusual political coincidences, Cambodian officials announced the “strengthening of bilateral ties” with Sweden – along with a $59 million aid package sweetener."
The implication is that the package helped (in part or in whole, that's not implied) sweeten the deal. How does the fact that it was decided half a year go make it obvious that the implication is wrong? Wasn't Svartholm wanted back then?
Svartholm has been in Cambodia for more than 5 months, hasn't he? Not to mention it's a known fact he's been there many times before. So wouldn't it make sense that the Swedish government made this look like it wasn't related by pre-planning in advance the all of a sudden generous and higher than usual aide payment in exchange for Svartholm being deported?
Oh, and by the way: If Torrentfreak would like to be considered a venue of serious journalism, they ought to learn how to find sources like the one Peer linked to. It's not even written in Swedish, for the love of ${DEITY}, so I do think it can be considered low-hanging fruit.
Coincidentally, it would be thirty hundred thousand times the amount I would pay to a local Cambodian corrupt cop to get that dude's ass on jail. With little variance. Point is, Swedish readers, you should vote me for chief prosecutor of your country.
No, seriously. TorrentFreak here wants us to believe that Cambodia got 40G$ for arresting someone who is not precisely Pablo Escobar reincarnate. Do they seriously want us to believe that the Swedish Minister of Justice is that incompetent? I mean, some calls, an Interpol red notice... I could get it done for less than a million, my fees included. So vote me.
You have experience paying money to corrupt cops in Cambodia? Are most cops in Cambodia corrupt? Did you already do that? Sounds interesting so could you elaborate?
Or have you never been to Cambodia and use HN to throw around racist comments about corruption in Asia?
Cambodia is ranked 164 out of 182 on the Corruption Perceptions Index list as of 2011, just slightly less corrupt than Libya. Not a very ringing endorsement.
It is easy to make up a conspiricy, and very hard to disprove it. Nevertheless...
Sweden's foreign aid policies are well respected internationally[1].
For TorrentFreak to try and imply that aid to Cambodia - one of the poorest countries in the world - was in any way linked to their coincidental arrest of a person with an international warrant out for his arrest is shameful.
If nothing else, the foreign aid was announced prior to his arrest[2] and is part of a long running aid program[3].
Not only is it entirely made up, but it puts an unnecessary taint of corruption on a program that saves lives. As anyone scanning thread can attest, the last thing a foreign aid program needs is any kind of association with corruption - especially one that is made up.
It is well known that shoddy journalists can use their pulpit to smear anything they want and there is little that the target can do (eg, questions like "Tell me when you stopped beating your wife"). That is what is going on here, and people who are falling for it should be ashamed of themselves.
Viewed through Bayesian lens, the problem with this article is pretty obvious. You could almost define "speculative" as "giving an observation for which the priors are unclear and only vaguely gestured at".
Here, we have the observation that Sweden gave $60 million foreign aid to Cambodia, but we are given no clear idea of the prior probability that Sweden would give this much and at this time (but we are given the implication that the evidence is significant). We don't need a hard probability estimate (few of us are actually going to rigorously apply Bayes' rule), but we do need enough information to come to a basic idea of the probability on our own. What does Sweden usually give to Cambodia? When is this usually announced? If this is an unusual amount of money, are there other good explanations for this besides corruption?
The problem is that the data in the article leaves us to use a relatively uninformed prior. $60 million is not that much money for a nation with Sweden's economy. It seems fairly likely that some kind of diplomatic news mention would happen regarding Sweden and Cambodia within any given two week period (close enough to appear associated with any given event), and since Sweden and Cambodia are on friendly terms, that mention is likely to be positive. Supposing that this is an unusually large amount of aid, there are plenty of possible reasons that Cambodia, often plagued with both droughts and floods, might have been hit particularly hard in the last year and needed more, so even if this is an unusual amount of aid. This all puts the prior for the observation pretty high, which cuts its evidential weight down very very low. As you illustrated, that prior gets higher as we add information, further weakening the evidence.
Here's hoping that some real, investigative journalist (i.e. not someone from Torrentfreak) will start digging into these events. Currently it's just an unfounded insinuation.
Agreed. It will however take original research, which costs time and money. I reckon that's a bit of an issue for most blog writers (and of course that applies for lots of people that write for traditional publications as well).
Sweden have in the past (since 1979) sent aid to Cambodia.
In 2011 we sent 168 million SEK and in 2012 and 2013 we will send 200 million (a total of 400 million for 2 years) and this was decided a long time ago.
Do you really think Sweden will pay 400 million to get one person back and have him serve ONE year in prison?
For sure not. But if I'd pay 400M SEK and had a little wish, I'm sure I'd let the other side know about my wishes.
It's not my argument, but the interesting argument is not that Sweden paid 400M SEK to get a prisoner - that cause and effect are working this way. But it's interesting that he is arrested after quite some time in Cambodia and Sweden is paying 400M SEK aid.
It's quite literally exactly what propaganda is, according to dictionaries, wikipedia, etc... it doesn't stop being propaganda just because you like what they have to say, that just makes it successful propaganda. Also in the literal sense.
It also carries a lot of unspoken subtext, commonly used by opponents of a position to denigrate the argument without ever responding to it. "Oh it's just propaganda, it can be ignored"
Propaganda doesn't have to be "misleading", it's pushing the same narrow viewpoint over and over again to further some agenda. The agenda's called "making money off ads".
This article's a great example since this money is only a small increase on the annual aid Sweden has been giving Cambodia for years, as pointed out in comments.
Or in TorrentFreak speak, "Sweden bribing Cambodia for Pirate Bay arrest since 1979!".
It does according to the dictionary definitions I'm reading. Going by your definition, any viewpoint can be "propaganda" as long as it's repeated often enough for an agenda. Civil rights comes to mind, where the agenda is equality, but you don't hear anyone but far-right wingnuts calling the repeated insistence that discrimination is wrong propaganda.
It's a loaded term, best avoided.
The agenda's called "making money off people who want to believe they're the hero in this story for pirating X"
And there's the denigration. That didn't take long.
This article's a great example since this money is only a small increase on the annual aid Sweden has been giving Cambodia for years
That seems at odds with the numbers others here have quoted from openaid.se, but that site gives me nothing but 'Application Error' when I try to figure out the reason for the disagreement between the two sources and I can't seem to get a Google cache for that page.
> Ah, so the folks who were inexplicably sure that it had nothing to do with his Pirate Bay association were completely wrong.
I know that was probably an emotional response and the phrase "correlation does not imply causation" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus... ) gets thrown around here alot more than it should but that's a very strong statement to make.
Is it possible that it's true, yes. Is there evidence that makes it appear likely, not that I've seen.
Maybe there will be more evidence coming up to help prove the swedes bribed the Cambodians to arrest him, but so far it looks like its way to soon to say this is definitely what happened.
Yes, plausible deniability is present... the Swedish may have a soft spot for Cambodia's challenges. A list of Swedish foreign aid amounts and recipients would be interesting to compare this $59M with.
A more interesting question is, who is paying the Swedes, and how? They really don't have a dog in this fight, so whatever motivation they have, it hasn't been made public. Yet.
Thanks for the enlightening observation, but I'm already quite aware that TPB is in Sweden; nonetheless, the Swedish government has gone to what would seem to be extraordinary lengths to punish an offense that has had a minimal impact on its citizens, and rather disproportionate impact on outsiders. I ask again, what are the Swedes getting out of this?
Historically, Sweden has to rely on the US for defence vs a certain Bear in their neighbourhood. Even during the Cold War, their allegedly-neutral stance was really backed by US reassurances. Maintaining good relationships with their American friends is clearly seen by the establishment as worth much more than the life of a couple of nerds and some free movies.
As for the motives... IF the arrest of Anakata was a paid job, what other reasons than keeping good relations with the U.S. do we (or rather, the Swedish state) need?
A fair statement, but I'm not sure that nebulous 'good relations' are enough to explain the amount of time and money the Swedish government is pouring into what would seem, at least from a Swedish perspective, to be petty crime at best. I suspect there are much more specific gains being had, maybe officially through some kind of US concessions or accommodations, or unofficially. Certainly the RIAA and MPAA can open (and close) lucrative doors to Swedish media, for example.
It’s sad the trolls seem to have gotten hold of this.
Torrent Freak has not even gone close to saying Sweden has bought him.
When countries give foreign aid, it is often, at least in part, for power plays.
Japan regularly does this in the pacific islands and uses their support to continue whaling. To argue the amount of money they give (quite large) is so they can continue whaling is also ridiculous. In fact most Japanese don’t even eat whale or care about the issue. It’s mostly political.
Sweden is owed a few favours and it seems they have called one in. The story here is why they have chosen this as one of them.
Is there actually a scandal here? An extradition treaty would allow Sweden to remove criminals from Cambodia. Just because there is no treaty, that doesn't mean that Cambodia can't hand criminals over, does it?
It would have been nice if TorrentFreak would've quoted a few of the references made in the discussion here, namely:
1) how much of an increase this is compared to the regular yearly foreign aid of Sweden to Cambodia (I understand it's 150%, so "just" 20M extra, and that the yearly foreign aid to Cambodia has very little variance.
2) when this increase was decided upon.
3) since when Svartholm was wanted, and known/expected to flee to Cambodia.
Those answers still don't quite rule out the two events are connected, but it would definitely make TorrentFreak's article quite a lot more balanced. Besides, it's easy enough to expose the big entertainment lobbies and their copyright watchdogs without making things up.
It also shows that HN is better at doing proper journalistic research ;-)
