A Swiss computer hacker named Till Kottmann has been charged by the US government with multiple accounts of wire fraud, conspiracy, and identity theft. The indictment accuses Kottmann and co-conspirators of hacking “dozens of companies and government entities,” and posting private data and source code belonging to more than 100 firms online.

The 21-year-old Kottmann, who uses they / them pronouns and is better known as Tillie, was most recently connected to the security breach of US firm Verkada, which exposed footage from more than 150,000 of the companies’ surveillance cameras. But the charges filed this week date back to 2019, with Kottmann and associates accused of targeting online code repositories (known as “gits”) belonging to major private and public sector entities, ripping their contents and sharing them to a website they founded and maintained named git.rip.

Kottmann told Bloomberg their reasons for hacking were “lots of curiosity, fighting for freedom of information and against intellectual property, a huge dose of anti-capitalism, a hint of anarchism — and it’s also just too much fun not to do it.”

Young , naive and slightly stupid guy.

Famous picture

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, not yet Lenin, receives news that abruptly changed his life: that his older brother Alexander was executed for organizing the assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander III. And he says to his grief-stricken mother: "We will go the other way."

In 1894, Dmitry Ulyanov asked his brother, according to his memoirs:

We have a lot of old comrades, known to us, why not start and create a terrorist organization?
And what is it for? - objected Vladimir. - Suppose they succeeded in the assassination attempt, would have succeeded in killing the tzar, but what does it matter?
What does it matter?, - Dmitry was taken aback, - would have a tremendous impact on society.
What society? What kind of society do you mean? Is this the liberal society that plays cards and eats stellate sturgeon under horseradish and dreams of a scanty constitution? Do you mean this society? This society should not interest you, we are not interested in it ...

Anti-capitalist agenda must be smarter and targeted to blow tech giants from inside, to set their own workers against owners and top managers.