FBI operation "Site Down" against the warez scene. Will we find out the truth?

In 2005, along with many others, 22-year-old Matthew Thompson from Lubbock, Texas, was arrested by the FBI as part of Operation Sitedown. This international law enforcement initiative ended with arrests on June 29 at the same time in 10 countries of the world, its goal was large figures of the so-called warez scene. Thompson, or Wicked1, as he was known on the net, participated in the Centropy group, the world's largest film pirate group.

And now, after almost 7 years, this spring, Matthew announced his intention to write a book, in his message on the kickstarter it was said that he was collecting money for the publication, as well as to receive official documents and other data related to the investigation from the government and his accusation, which he was about to publish. Later in an interview for torrentfreakhe told in more detail what this book will be about, and gave a small passage.

First, he writes how exactly over time he got into this group, after participating in many other smaller ones, and what exactly he did there. And then the following part follows:

My pirate life went uphill. I had access to everything, whatever I wanted, I was a member of one of the largest groups that ever existed. And then the Fastlink operation happened.

The US Department of Justice, together with the Interpol Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Office, have been preparing this operation for many years. They were about to destroy the groups Fairlight, Kalisto, Echelon, ProjectX, and Class.

In 2001, during the Buccaneer operation, I was also in business, but it had practically no effect on the pirate world. Fastlink was another matter because Fairlight (FLT) and its partner groups were some of the largest and most secure bands on the scene.

I woke up on the morning of April 22, 2004, and discovered what could well be called chaos in IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Centropy's closed IRC server did not work, and none of the group was on Efnet or Linknet, and virtually all the sites I used were offline for security reasons.

When I eventually managed to get in touch with several fellow sceners, they told me that the FLT and most of their sites were covered, and that I had better go to the bottom for a while. The fact that the FLT was covered didn't bother me much; but two of their American sites - Optical Illusion and DOH - were also covered, and I was on both.

As most reasonable people would have done, for fear of going to jail, I destroyed all my hard drives, and burned all the CDs and DVDs that I had on a remote field outside the city. For the next 2 months, I disappeared from the pirate world until my friends korax and Dact told me about the new cool gigabit topsite that was held by a dude named Griffen.

The topsite was called CHUD (short for Can't Hold us Down). Griffin and his website, as it turns out later, will turn against us in the most terrible way imaginable ...

So Matthew ended his story, apparently hoping to interest future readers. We do not know what happened next, but how this whole story ended has long been known . As it turned out, the top sites CHUD and LAD were organized by the FBI, they were used to lure and discredit the sceners. The agent’s nickname was really a griffin. As a result of this operation, more than 40 people were arrested and convicted.

There were quite a few conflicting comments on the article, about the scene in general, about the Centropy band, that he could write and post his story for free, on the whole, everyone agreed that many would like to buy or download his book. But most importantly, with all this discussion, one old story surfaced.

Several people noted that the events of 2005 in which Matthew participated were strangely reminiscent of a fictional story shown at the same time in the series “Scene” , and that it remains unclear whether this coincidence was accidental or not. Matthew confirmed that he was about to shed light on this in his book. What were these events?

The series is about a fictional, but also the largest film group in the world, against which the FBI has been developing plans for many years. At the beginning of June (3 weeks before the operation sitedown), the 9th episode of the series was released, in which a new character unexpectedly appeared, under the nickname "Griffin", and at the time when this happened, the instrumental composition of Temple City "Paranoid Delusions" was playing in the background , in which the phrase "He works for the FBI" was repeated several times.

Immediately after the arrests, in early July 2005, speculation began on the Internet about whether the authors of the series (many of whom, by their admission, were sceners with experience) could not try to warn everyone about the upcoming operation. There is information about Bruce Forest, one of the founders of the company that shot the series, and at the same time doing reviews of the state of the pirate world for MPAA and RIAA.

In general, in the film you can, if you wish, find many strange coincidences with real events and names, especially since it was beneficial for the authors to increase popularity, but coincidence with the griffin, as one commentator noted, of all existing conspiracy theories is the most plausible. The authors even published an official response, where they claimed that they could not have known about the FBI's plans, and that they had invented a nickname themselves, therefore, a coincidence.

Since then, there has been no information about the book or about Thompson himself. I will not judge what thoughts the FBI or sceners might have about a man who was going to tell in detail about the events of those years. Will we ever find out what really happened then, or will it remain a mystery forever? Most likely, this will become clear in the coming years.