Stuge says..

A reaction to the Police raid on premises of hackerspace Forskningsavdelningen in Malmö.

MC has written a good summary in english of the many swedish news articles. I recommend you to start reading there for a summary of events.

I have had a strong interest in technology since I was 4-or-so years old. I have a distinct memory from that age of taking apart a radio receiver and putting it back together again. It looked strange and intriguing on the inside. I've spent the larger part of my life learning about technology on my own, with fairly little resources.

Technology is a passion for me.

Over the years I've managed to acquire some amount of equipment and competence, in areas that have been particularly interesting. In the course of trying to develop a company I've invested in creating a basic electronics lab, but I am also still using equipment from when I was a child. Just last week I spent a few hours on repairing a variable benchtop power supply which I remember buying with combined christmas present money in the early 1990s.

I have always felt that anything offered to me in school in my field of interest was inadequate and dissatisfying.

I knew when I was in fourth grade that I wanted to design and produce electronics. I was very happy when I was given a simple soldering iron on my 10th birthday. I collected LEDs and sold self-soldered headphone Y-connectors to my classmates for their walkmans, and I told them about how I was looking forward to seventh grade, because I knew that there was an electronics course in the curriculum and I hoped to learn more there.

Came that time, I was disappointed. I knew it all. I assisted the teacher. I continued on my own. Absurdity progressed with age - in high school I was correcting errors in the programming course litterature. I didn't go to university, in part because I was so sick of school, in part because I got a job, in part because I had learned about some university schoolwork from older friends, and again it left me unimpressed. (I am not saying that there is nothing to learn at the university - there is always a lot to learn, everywhere!)

I proudly think of myself as an autodidactic hacker. "Hacker" translates to curiosity and an urge for understanding. Other, maybe more familiar, words could be scientist, researcher or developer, but those words usually apply only in some particular settings in our society.

The hackerspace name Forskningsavdelningen translates to "The research department".

It has taken me 20 years to build an electronics lab. Now, I barely find time to work there, and my only real chance of exploring electronics further is to slowly introduce interesting technology when it makes sense in my customers' projects.

I have always felt fairly alone in my city. I had one or two friends with whom I explored technology in my school years, programming games, building I/O expansions for PC and Amiga, and adding some relays to them in order to flash lights. A few years ago I started visiting the conference between Christmas and New Year's Eve arranged by the Chaos Computer Club in Berlin, and maybe for the first time in my life, I felt that I had come to a conference where I truly belonged. (Defcon was fun too.) Last year I was very happy to run into a few people from my own city, and to learn that they had started a hackerspace here!

I have made some good friends at the hackerspace, two of us are studying to become licensed amateur radio operators, others at the space are already licensed, and we (well, I at least) want to experiment with radio networks in urban environments, with long range and reliability having very clear priority over high throughput.

I'm fairly certain that my life would have been better both when growing up and today, if I had been able to join a hackerspace and go there to experiment, learn and evolve, together with my peers! If we had been 20 people, maybe it would have taken us just a few years to build a lab like the one that has taken me 20 years to build alone?

Reading about how the Police's "disruption of an illegal nightclub" has in fact disrupted the hackerspace here in Malmö leaves me once again feeling profound disappointment.

I can't say if the hackerspace was targeted specifically. In any case I am very sad that the Police is unable to discriminate better and operate more intelligently, with higher precision, so that they can avoid collateral damage to nerds, and other friendly citizens!

Apparently - if you are a really big corporation in this country, you can play the legal system any which way you like. But if you are an individual or a loosely organized small group, you are, in practice, without legal rights.

I might have been at the hackerspace last weekend. Had I been there I expect that this laptop I am typing on now would have been seized. This is the tool that I use every single day, for most of my wake hours. Maybe you depend on your computer too?

A few laptops have been stolen from me. The first time it happened was here in Malmö. There was evidence at the scene (outdoors) and I called the Police to report the crime. They informed me that unfortunately they would not be able to investigate. I lost 18 months of work because I did not have a backup scheme. That has been solved since, but I would still have felt severely violated if the Police had taken any equipment of mine this weekend. (I don't think I would get it back in a very timely manner.)

The worst part is that I don't feel that there is anything I can do to make a direct change.