In July 2016, Artem Vaulin left Ukraine for a vacation to Iceland with his family, but he never made it to his destination. During a layover in Poland, Vaulin — the 31-year-old accused by the United States of operating KickassTorrents (KAT), the web’s most popular place to illegally obtain movies, songs, and video games — was arrested by authorities.  

Until last week, Vaulin had been held at Warsaw-Bialoleka Investigative Detention Center with little contact to the outside world while the Polish government evaluated a US extradition request. Last Tuesday, two days before his release, The Verge sat down with Vaulin in his jail cell for a two-hour interview — the first since his arrest — to discuss his extradition fight and his life inside jail.

The day before I arrived at Bialoleka, I attended a court hearing in Warsaw to decide on a request made by Vaulin’s attorneys that, after 10 months, he be released on bail for medical reasons. Vaulin suffers from a spinal condition from well before his arrest, his lawyers say. Just like with his previous requests, the court turned him down. But this past Thursday, the court unexpectedly reversed its decision.

Today Vaulin is out of jail, but unable to leave the country. He was released on $108,000 bail, according to his lawyers, and his passport was confiscated. An extradition process could take months. In the meantime, he is living in a rented Warsaw apartment with his wife and five-year-old son.

“We are pleased that the Polish Court allowed Artem Vaulin to be free on bail,” said Ira Rothken, the Silicon Valley-based lawyer representing Vaulin. Rothken is perhaps best known for defending accused Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom. “This will allow Artem to care for his health, be with his family, and assist in his legal defense.”

Founded in 2008, KickassTorrents became the go-to destination for torrenting movies after the Feds took down Dotcom’s juggernaut of a file-hosting service in 2012. According to the criminal complaint against Vaulin, filed on July 8th, 2016 in the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division, 50 million people visited KAT each month, making it the 69th most-visited site in the world. Prosecutors said KAT distributed $1 billion worth of copies of songs, films, and other media. They also said Vaulin pocketed tens of millions of dollars from ad revenue.

Vaulin’s story is unique because few website operators have gone to jail for as long as he has without being convicted. Fewer still are believed to have been sent to a place like Bialoleka.

Vaulin recalled that not long after his arrest he needed to be taken to the hospital for back pain. He was astonished to learn he would be escorted by four policemen wearing ski masks and armed with machine guns. During the ambulance ride, with the siren blaring and the lights flashing, Vaulin says one of his guards told him they had heard he was responsible for the murder of three people.

“No,” a spooked Vaulin told the guard. “It’s just about torrents.”

In the 2000s, the early days of torrenting, web piracy allegations were nearly always settled in civil court, not criminal court. Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, co-founders of the first mainstream file-sharing site Napster, were the target of lawsuits that caused their company to go bankrupt, but neither Fanning nor Parker went to jail. The same went for the founders of LimeWire, Hotfile, TorrentSpy, Isohunt, Grooveshark, and all the other companies that were accused of enabling piracy and sued out of existence. Among the few who were convicted and sent to prison were the three founders of The Pirate Bay, probably the best-known and most defiant file-sharing service of all time. According to reports, Peter Sunde served five months and Fredrik Neij spent less than eight months in jail. It’s unclear how much time Gottfrid Svartholm Warg actually served for copyright violations as he was given a concurrent multi-year sentence for non-related hacking offenses.  

The US signaled a change in attitude on January 19th, 2012 when New Zealand police busted Kim Dotcom on behalf of the US Department of Justice in a dramatic raid. Today, Dotcom remains free on bail in New Zealand, fighting US extradition attempts. Dotcom’s high-profile arrest was a sign that the US would encourage international agents to take down serial criminal copyright violators in much the same way they prosecute dope dealers and organized crime figures. The scare tactic seems to be effective. In the past few months, some of the web’s top file-sharing hubs, including TorrentHound, What.cd, and Torrentz.eu have closed down. Just last week, ExtraTorrent notified users that it was going offline forever. “Thanks to all ET supporters and torrent community. ET was a place to be…”

Vaulin’s incarceration in Bialoleka, 17 miles north of Warsaw, seems to be another warning to file-sharing moguls.

Bialoleka was built in 1952 during the Soviet Union’s rule over Poland. The 1,300-person detention facility once held some of the leaders of Solidarity, the independent Polish labor movement that became a symbol of resistance and eventually helped bring down the USSR. Today it holds a range of criminals, including violent offenders.

From outside, the jail looks like any other: four drab buildings surrounded by high walls topped by barbed wire. When I entered his cell, Vaulin was lying on a hospital bed that had been brought in for him. The cell was about 25 square meters, which is a little small for two people. With pastel-colored walls and plentiful sunlight coming through the barred window, it was cheerier than I had expected. One of Vaulin’s lawyers, Tatiana Pacewicz, said, “This is the VIP room. Other rooms, not so nice.”

Pacewicz and Vaulin’s wife, Olga Nikolayeva, said Vaulin typically shared a 15-square-meter cell with three other inmates. That area — the size of a single-car parking space — contained a toilet, four men, their possessions, and two sets of bunk beds. Vaulin says that for a time he was placed in a cell with a man accused of murder. According to Pacewicz, this was just one of the many ways that the jail and Poland’s government regularly failed to meet the standards recommended by the Council of Europe for the humane treatment of prisoners.

“(Jail cells) shall only be shared,” wrote the Council’s Committee of Ministers, “if it is suitable for this purpose and shall be occupied by prisoners suitable to associate with each other.”

Vaulin’s lawyers also stressed the facility’s administration’s disregard for Vaulin’s back pain. During visits to the hospital, he was forced to sleep with his leg chained to the bed. Back at the jail, Vaulin was transferred between cells seven times; he was made to carry all his possessions to a new cell in one trip: books, legal papers, cups, pots, etc.  

“The first time I had so much pain,” Vaulin said. “Yes, I told the guards. But they work 9 to 5. It is a job and my problem doesn’t interest them. One told me: ‘If you’re healthy enough to talk, then it’s not urgent.’”

Though Vaulin is not a confident English speaker, with the help of his English-speaking attorney and an English-Russian Dictionary, he made himself easily understood.

Prisoners receive the same meal every day, according to Vaulin. Earlier his wife had complained that he had dropped weight during his incarceration. Because he wore loose-fitting pants and a T-shirt, it was difficult to tell his condition. Beside the fact that he was laying in a hospital bed, he appeared healthy.  

The facility’s officials did not respond to an interview request last week.

The US government has said in court that Vaulin has only himself to blame for his incarceration in Poland.

“He is in custody based upon his own decision to resist extradition,” said Devlin Su, a DOJ prosecutor, during a hearing on Vaulin’s case last January. “He could easily have agreed to extradition back when he was arrested in July. He could agree to it now. He doesn’t have to sit in jail in Poland. The only reason he’s doing that is because he wants to put up as many roadblocks as possible.”

“We believe the indictment lacks merit,” says Rothken. “We have a motion to dismiss pending in federal court in Chicago.”

I asked Vaulin about the charges against him, and if he ever operated KAT until his arrest in 2016, as the US government alleges. Did he knowingly commit copyright infringement? Vaulin said Rothken advised him not to discuss any specific allegations about his case.

But he did offer this: “I’m a businessman. When I start a business I consult lawyers. I was never told that anything I was involved in was against the law.”

“I’m not crazy,” Vaulin said, clarifying that he was speaking hypothetically. “If someone came to me to tell me the United States was angry with something I do, whatever it was, I would stop.”

Joseph Fitzpatrick, a spokesperson for the US District Court in Illinois, which filed the indictment against Vaulin, declined to comment on Vaulin’s statements.

In the criminal complaint, prosecutors say they can prove Vaulin founded and operated KAT, tried to conceal the nature of its business, and flatly “ignored” the requirements under copyright law that service providers must obey if they don’t want to be liable for their users’ copyright infringement.

Investigators say it was Vaulin who registered KAT’s site in 2009, and it was Vaulin who updated KAT’s Facebook fan page. They claim Vaulin was the one who directly controlled the bank account where millions of dollars of KAT’s ad revenue poured in each month. They say they know all this by tracking his IP address, along with information provided by Apple.

Some in the tech press have mocked Vaulin for not doing a better job of concealing his identity, calling his use of an Apple email a “colossal screwup.“ But Vaulin insists he was unaware of any wrongdoing. He traveled widely through US-friendly territories during the time he is said to have run KAT.

“I wasn’t afraid to travel,” he said. “I had nothing to hide.”

The United States maintains that Vaulin was aware of his criminal activities, and that’s why he attempted to mask KAT’s piracy operations by tucking them inside a dummy company called Cryptoneat.  

“Cryptoneat is not a company,” Vaulin told The Verge. “It’s just a brand, a trademark that I created. There are no employees. It’s a good name that I liked and intended to use someday. Someone in the Justice Department made a mistake. A company called Cryptoneat doesn’t exist.”

As the conversation wrapped up, stewards rolled up to his cell with a couple containers of food.

Vaulin insists that he’s innocent, and he holds no grudges toward the studios that encourage the zealous prosecution of individuals taking part in file-sharing services.

“No, I don’t hate [the Hollywood studios],” he said. “They are just interested in making money. They want to save their business. They don’t want to compete. But putting me in prison isn’t going to help them. Torrents aren’t going to stop. Everybody in poor countries torrents. Some of the guards [here] told me they torrent.”   

Correction May 24th, 9:06AM ET: This story originally misspelled the name of Tatiana Pacewicz, Artem Vaulin’s attorney.

Correction May 25th, 4:56PM ET: This story originally mistakenly cited Council of Europe recommendations as EU recommendations.

Laurent Theron is shouting at two policemen and waving his arms around for emphasis. From a distance, he looks more like a guy arguing over a parking ticket than a man who just suffered an injury that will leave him permanently blind in his right eye.

Last Thursday (September 15th), just a few minutes before he began yelling at the cops, Theron, a 46-year-old union activist, was with thousands of others in the Place de Republique, one of the main squares in Paris. He was protesting against a controversial new labor law in France when a projectile crashed into his face. Theron stumbled out of the square looking for help and that’s when he met the cops and a couple of reporters, including me. To look at the wound was stomach turning. I couldn’t help but pity him, knowing that he probably was going to lose the eye.

“Look at me. You shot me.”

Already, the area around the eye was grotesquely swollen. The eye itself was pierced and slashed.

“Look at me,” Theron yelled at the officers. “You shot me.”

Theron later told French news outlets that he suspected he was hit by a teargas canister fired from a launcher. But video taken of the incident, as well as statements by witnesses, indicate he was more likely injured by a fragment from what the French call a “désencerclement grenade.”

To scatter crowds, French police employ an explosive designed to cause an ear-splitting bang along with a blast of rubber shrapnel in a 10-meter radius. The video appears to show that one of these grenades detonated not far from Theron just before he collapsed. This kind of supposedly “non-lethal” explosive is popular with police around the world. The idea behind them is to disorient and frighten, not seriously injure.

Only, what happened to Theron is no freak accident. From the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter demonstrations, Theron is just one of the thousands of people who have been maimed or killed in recent years by weapons that aren’t supposed to cause great bodily injury.

What happened to Theron is no freak accident

How best to respond to a protest is almost certainly on the minds of authorities in Charlotte, North Carolina today. The fatal shooting Tuesday of 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott sparked a second night of violent protests and looting Wednesday night in downtown Charlotte. Police responded by deploying tear gas, and the state’s governor activated the national guard. It’s already a familiar pattern among controversial police shootings involving unarmed black men: Scott’s family says he was unarmed, while police say he was armed and dangerous.

In 2014, the demonstrations that followed the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri led to 10 protesters and six policemen being injured. The police response to peaceful protest looked like a military occupation. Heavy-handed responses to demonstrations, especially peaceful ones, can ignite more violence or turn public opinion against leaders. That’s why governments are searching for new ways to quell riots or violent protests without the use of deadly force. But options are limited.

French police have typically relied on tear gas and pepper spray to disperse protesters during the protests against a new labor law known as Loi Travail.

“Lethal in Disguise,” a report released in March on crowd-control weapons (CCWs) by Physicians for Human Rights and the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations, was highly critical of CCWs and how they are used by police.

“The proliferation of CCWs without adequate regulation, training, monitoring, and/or accountability, has led to the widespread and routine use or misuse of these weapons,” the authors wrote. “There is a pressing need to engage in further ethical research and empirical studies to develop clear scientific standards and parameters.”

Crowd control weapons have routinely been misused by police

There’s already plenty of real-world evidence behind those findings. A year ago in Nepal, police fired rubber bullets at people protesting the country’s new constitution. Four were killed, including a four-year-old child. During the 2013 protests in Brazil against price hikes on bus and train travel, one man lost the vision in his right eye when he was hit by a fragment from an explosive similar to France’s désencerclement grenade. At the same protest, a photographer was hit by a rubber bullet and blinded in one eye.

Photographer Tali Mayer has taken portraits of the people who have been injured, many of them blinded, by “sponge bullets” fired by Israeli law enforcement. In Kashmir in 2014, Indian police drove off demonstrators by shooting pellets. Sometimes, the pellets just penetrated skin and other times they pierced eyes. The situation isn’t much better in wealthy countries with well-funded police forces.

Paris this year has seen some of its worst street fighting since 1968. Labor unions and leftist groups oppose the adoption of a new law that in part makes it easier for employers to lay off workers. A relatively small number have adopted tactics that include kicking in storefront windows, shattering bus stop enclosures, and pelting police with rocks, wine bottles, and Molotov cocktails. Two policemen suffered burns after being hit by cocktails during last Thursday’s demonstration.

French cops typically respond with tear gas or by thwacking troublemakers with batons. When outnumbered and threatened, they are allowed to use désencerclement grenades. According to police policy, officers are required to roll the grenades into crowds to help limit the chances of head injuries. Nonetheless, in May a photographer suffered a facial injury when a grenade detonated near his head. Later that month, a freelance journalist spent a week in a coma after a grenade fragment crushed part of his skull.

A French policeman prepares to fire tear gas during a demonstration in Paris last May.

Law enforcement’s appetite for less-lethal crowd control methods has created a huge opportunity for private companies, and some high-tech products have already entered the market. Two areas that have shown promise are acoustic weapons and directed energy devices, but like other less-lethal devices, they’re still controversial.

Acoustic weapons, sometimes called sonic cannons, are designed to direct loud noises over long distances. Typically they use large numbers of transducers to amplify and concentrate sounds that create discomfort in the human ear. Perhaps the best known of these devices is the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD). Police in Poland, India, Israel Oakland, California, and Ferguson, Missiouri, have reportedly used LRADs. But “less-lethal” doesn’t necessarily mean safe. In March, five people filed a lawsuit against the New York Police Department alleging they experienced nausea, headaches, and persistent ringing in their ears after police aimed an LRAD at protesters in December 2014. The manufacturer, LRAD Corp., has repeatedly said the device is safe and effective.

“Less-lethal” doesn’t mean safe

Then there’s the “heat-ray.” It works by focusing a beam of electromagnetic waves at a high frequency and short wave length. They are designed to create a burning sensation at the skin surface without penetrating deep and potentially damaging cells. But like sonic cannons, heat rays, tear gas, and non-lethal grenades, all of these technologies are capable of inflicting harm on entire crowds — making them especially problematic when used on people in lawful, peaceful gatherings.

Sadly, Laurent Theron became one of those unnecessary casualties. The video that shows when he was wounded doesn’t indicate there was anybody nearby confronting or threatening police. He said that when he was hit, he was standing with his hands in his pockets.

“My eye was saved, but the vision was lost,” he told French newspaper Liberation. “Anybody can lose an eye at a peaceful demonstration.”

Ultimately, Hunter Moore was right. The man who built a name for himself by helping people use the internet to humiliate and ruin the reputations of former lovers, often laughed at predictions that he’d one day pay a big price for his actions.

Moore is one of the pioneers of revenge porn, the practice of posting nude or sexual photos of someone — typically a former lover — without their permission. His now defunct web site, IsAnyoneUp.com, hosted scores of these photos before he shut it down in April 2012. The motive of the people who posted on the site was simple: they wished to terrorize.

On Wednesday, a federal judge sentenced Moore to 30 months in prison, three years of supervised release, and a $2,000 fine. A punishment like this for a guy like Moore surprised and disappointed many revenge porn victims and advocates, according to Annmarie Chiarini, director of victims services at the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a group dedicated to fighting revenge porn.

Moore often laughed at predictions that he’d one day pay a big price

“That’s a bullshit sentence,” said Chiarini, who in 2010 saw an ex-lover post intimate photos of her on eBay. “That’s just a ridiculously low number of years in jail. It is some satisfaction that he’s serving time but really his sentence is nothing. He’s not really paying for his crimes.”

The truth is Moore, 29, is paying for his crimes, only those crimes have little to do with revenge porn. Moore, who could not be reached for comment, admitted in February to paying a hacker to steal intimate photos from the email accounts of young women so he could post them to his site. He pleaded guilty to a single count each of computer hacking and identity theft. The law designed to outlaw revenge porn adopted in California, where Moore resided, was passed after he shuttered his site. Had it been around at the time, Moore might have received additional jail time. Last December, Noe Iniquez became the first person convicted under the law and was sent to prison for a year.

“That’s a bullshit sentence.”

It’s particularly galling because if revenge porn has a father, it’s Moore. He helped show the world the broadcast power of the web and how it could be weaponized. He reveled in being what he called a “professional liferuiner.”

“Somebody was gonna monetize this, and I was the person to do it,” Moore said during a 2011 interview with Anderson Cooper. When Moore later tried to shift the blame to the people posting the photos, Cooper noted this didn’t give him license to profit from their pics. Moore responded: “But I want to. Why wouldn’t I? I get to look at naked girls all day.”

In a 2012 interview with The Village Voice, Moore said: “I’m gonna sound like the most evil motherf*er — let’s be real for a second: If somebody killed themselves over that? Do you know how much money I’d make? At the end of the day, I do not want anybody to hurt themselves. But if they do? Thank you for the money.”

If revenge porn has a father, it’s Moore

Moore was prophetic. People have indeed killed themselves, maybe not as a result from photos being posted to his site, but from revenge porn — the practice he helped popularize. In September, a girl in Kenya killed herself after a man she knew threatened to post pictures of her online. The same year, a Brazilian teenage girl hanged herself after a sex tape she participated in was posted online.

Those are the extreme cases. Much more common is for revenge porn victims to lose jobs and find themselves ostracized by co-workers, friends, and family.

“[Putting Moore behind bars] is an accomplishment in so far that this is the first successful prosecution,” said Christina Gagnier, an attorney and member of the board for Without My Consent, a nonprofit privacy-protection group that works with revenge porn victims. “I think the downside is that the sentence is abominable. A two-year sentence doesn’t underscore the damage that was done.”

People have indeed killed themselves

Gagnier says, however, that progress is being made. In recent years, 25 US states have adopted laws that ban non-consensual pornography, and others are considering similar legislation. Some in Congress have been trying to make revenge porn a federal crime. Overseas, the number of countries that have outlawed it include Israel, the United Kingdom, and India.

Still, people who find revealing photos of themselves online continue to face plenty of obstacles to getting them removed. Maybe as many as 3,000 web sites host those types of pics, according to Chiarini. Then there is the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which protects web hosts from liability for material published by users, as long as they act fast by copyright owners when ordered to remove it. The law was created before revenge porn, but it offers those who traffic in that kind of material the same sort of protection as Comcast or AT&T.

Law enforcement often doesn’t have the technical sophistication to enforce the laws

One of the biggest problems for victims is that law enforcement often doesn’t have the technical sophistication to enforce the laws already on the books, according to Gagnier. Other times, she said they don’t have the will.

“A couple of years ago,” Gagnier said, “I went to a conference and this topic came up and there was a leading law enforcement official there who heard the term revenge porn and he started giggling. I sat in my seat and kind of went ‘Oh crap. If law enforcement is laughing about this then we’re in trouble.’ That’s when I knew we still had a long way to go on this issue.”

Kim Dotcom, founder of the now defunct file-storage service Megaupload, made his long awaited appearance in a New Zealand court on Thursday.

Indicted by the United States on criminal copyright violations in January 2012, Dotcom testified at a hearing to determine whether he and three other former Megaupload executives will be extradited to the US to stand trial. For nearly four years, lots of legal jockeying has prevented the hearing from getting to court, and even now Dotcom’s attorneys seek yet another postponement.

The defense claims the US is trying to starve the defendants of resources. When the DOJ arrested Dotcom and six other Megaupload executives, it accused them of overseeing one of the all-time largest internet piracy operations. The men’s assets were seized and since then the feds have refused to release a cent for the defendants’ legal defense. In the meantime, the money Dotcom earned from other business ventures started subsequent to the Megaupload shutdown, was frozen last year following a civil complaint filed against him by the top Hollywood film studios.

Ira Rothken, Megaupload’s lead lawyer told the court that without access to some of these funds, Dotcom and the accused executives can’t adequately defend themselves.

New Zealand prosecutors, arguing on behalf of the United States, aren’t buying these claims. During their cross examination of Dotcom they asked him how much money he spent in 2014 helping to launch the Internet Party, a New Zealand political group focused on protecting privacy and Internet freedom. On the stand Dotcom said he contributed between $4.6 to $4.8 million.

Prosecutors asked Dotcom how much he earned from the sale of shares in cloud storage service Mega, a company founded a year after his arrest. Dotcom told the judge the sale generated between $15 million and $20 million in New Zealand dollars, or about $13 million USD. Prosecutor Mike Ruffin then asked Dotcom why, with all this money, didn’t he put aside some for future legal bills? Why hadn’t he created a “fighting fund.”

Dotcom said that his first priority was to ensure his children’s education and the economic welfare of his wife, who is now estranged. Then he explained that he couldn’t have anticipated the Hollywood studios would grab money generated by business interests that had nothing to do with Megaupload.

“If I had a crystal ball or in hindsight, I probably should have done that”

“If I had a crystal ball or in hindsight, I probably should have done that,” Dotcom responded.

Dotcom seemed to become irritated with Ruffin’s line of questioning when the prosecutor asked why the Megaupload founder hadn’t used some of his living expenses to pay legal bills.

Dotcom said: “If i wanted to be homeless and fire all my staff and take my kids out of school, I could have done that, yes.”

According to Dotcom, the lack of resources has already led to serious repercussions. In February, Andrus Nõmm, an indicted former Megaupload programmer, plead guilty to felony copyright infringement and was sentenced to a year in prison. Finn Batato, one of the former Megaupload execs fighting extradition, said Nõmm is now cooperating with the DOJ.

Dotcom said via Twitter that the programmer simply ran out of money fighting extradition and was left with few choices.

Unless the judge overseeing the case, Nevin Dawson, agrees to the defense’s request to postpone the hearing or to throw the entire case out, it is expected to last at least another week.