I rather see it as highlighting a weakness in the system. Arresting someone on suspicion without evidence tying the human to the twitter account and to the actual crime is a sad state of affairs. People should be made aware that this kind of thing cam happen with little recourse for the mistakes of the police.

Wouldn't the analog(ue) be framing? Just because one can frame people (on-line or IRL) doesn't mean the system is flawed. It just means there are people out there willing to have someone else be the fall-person as an end, or as a distraction to buy time in order to escape (or allow the trail of evidence to tail off/go cold.)

I don't know precisely how it works in Scotland, but presumably they had evidence sufficient to obtain a warrant for the arrest. Are you really saying the police should have to prove guilt before arresting suspects?

The police (here in Scotland or pretty much anywhere) can arrest someone on suspicion of something with pretty minimal evidence, you don't need a warrant but once you have arrested them you then have to either charge them or release them within a relatively short space of time (our rather draconian anti-terror laws which mean they can be held for weeks without charge wouldn't apply here).

It makes no sense for them to arrest him without evidence. The two options for who arrested him are local or national police.

If it were the local police why would local police on a sparsely populated island with little crime go and arrest someone and accuse them of being a hacker with no evidence knowing that he'd be out in a day? It makes no sense to do so and if you did do it you certainly wouldn't go public with the arrest knowing you had no evidence.

On the other hand if you're national police working in cyber crime out of London, to make the arrest you've got to convince someone to pay to fly two officers six hundred miles north and them and the suspect back. Given that UK police are being asked to make massive budget cuts and are under significant scrutiny (particularly the Met who would likely be heading this) because of the phone hacking, that trip isn't getting signed off without someone convincing a senior officer that there was something to it.

So the chances of there being no evidence is basically nil. The evidence they have may be misinformation, or they may have misinterpreted it, but they will have believed that this guy was involved.

Looking into this a bit more it was national police from the Met in London who carried out this arrest.