Pirate Party offers Wikileaks hosting

Troublemakers unite?

The Swedish Pirate Party’s vice chairman, Anna Troberg, has offered to extend the party's hosting services and bandwidth to controversial whisteblower website, Wikileaks.

“If Wikileaks is again attacked, we will immediately offer them both the server space and bandwidth. Pirate Party believes in democracy and we are not afraid to stand up for it,” Troberg wrote in Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (Daily News) yesterday in a polemic against establishment secrecy.

The offer follows Wikileaks’ release on 25 July of its Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010, which contained some 91,000 classified documents detailing US and coalition military activity in the country in recent years.

“Democracy is not just about citizens voting who gets to lead the country. It is also about [having] adequate opportunity to make an informed decision before voting. It requires access to information, sometimes to the information that those in power do not want people to have,” Troberg argued in defence of Wikileaks' release of the logs.

The Pirate Party’s offer is not an empty one. It already hosts torrent search engine Pirate Bay’s website, after its web host caved in to legal pressure last month.

The Pirate Party is also beta-testing its own internet service, Pirate ISP, promising to offer torrent users an alternative, should other ISPs succumb to legal pressure to block The Pirate Bay website. 

Pirate Party member Gustav Nipe told iTNews last week that the Pirate Party hosted the Pirate Bay on the same servers that run the political website piratepartiet.se.

“So they need to shut down a political site to get the Bay. And yes, hell will open itself if they shut down piratpartiet.se,” Nipe explained. “With human shields we will defend it.” 

Gustav told iTNews at the time that he was proud that Wikileaks had found a safe haven in Sweden.

The links between Wikileaks and The Pirate movement are already well-established. Troberg noted that Wikileaks’ current host is PRQ, which is run by The Pirate Bay’s founders, Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij.

Troberg predicted Wikileak’s hosting arrangements would soon come under attack. 

“Wikileaks is under continuous attack. It would not surprise me at all about Sweden will soon be subjected to American pressure to shut down Wikileaks," she said.

"They have acted similarly in terms of Pirate Bay, and given that Wikileaks activities strikes at the heart of American power, it's probably just a matter of time before acting."

She challenged Swedish politicians to not bow to pressure from the US Government to shut Wikileaks down. 

“Will they have enough backbone to stand up on Wikileaks and democracy, or will they give way for the US and go after the PRQ and Wikileaks?”