To: Cyber From: San Diego
Re: 295B-SD-67338, O3/29/2005

Leachers are individuals who are sharing a file but do not have a full copy of the movie/program/game they are downloading. Seeders are individuals who have obtained 100% of the item they are downloading, and are now providing it to the other members. Uploaders are individuals who have been given the responsibility to obtain new material for the organization, create the torrent files, and share the files with the other members.

In the early 199Os, computer hackers and other individuals organized themselves into various international groups that became an underground Internet society known as the “warez scene.” The leading warez groups compete against each other to attain the reputation as the fastest provider of high-quality pirated computer software, including utility and application software, console games, and movies. These warez groups specialize in being the first to release new pirated software to the warez community for unauthorized reproduction and distribution worldwide.

The new mainstream technology and terminology quickly replacing the "warez" underworld is known as "BitTorrent" which has been touted by computer experts as one of the the biggest advances in Internet technology. BitTorrent was introduced as a program that allowed computer users to share and swap files, specifically music and movies, through a centralized file server. Preparing new pirated movies, music, games and software for release and distribution to the BitTorrent scene generally
requires a number of different steps. Mechanically, files shared over a BitTorrent system are broken down into separate parts that are separately shared. A user downloading over a BitTorrent network will begin sharing the parts of a file as he acquires them, which is even before he has acquired all of the parts of the larger file. The BitTorrent system is designed so that users will obtain the missing parts of the files they are acquiring faster if they upload the parts they acquire simultaneously as they download and acquire them. This combination of partial-sharing and tit-for-tat techniques generally results, especially for larger files such as movies, in BitTorrent providing faster downloads than competing peer-to-peer file transfer systems.

There are two types of programs that comprise the BitTorrent system: "clients" and "trackers." Clients are programs that users run to download and upload files. Trackers are programs that certain motivated parties run to tell the clients where they can located the files they want. This file-
location service is critical to the functioning of the BitTorrent system. A tracker tracks clients and maintains a list, or index,

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