Swedish police raid ISP for Pirate Bay and Wikileaks

Swedish news service nyheter24.se reports that authorities have raided web host PeRiQuito AB (PRQ). Police in Stockholm took four of the free-speech ISP's servers, PRQ owner Mikael Viborg told Nyheter24. Andy Greenberg at Forbes has more:

While a number of bittorrent-based filesharing sites including PRQ’s most notorious client, the Pirate Bay, have been down for most of Monday as well as PRQ’s own website, Viborg told the Swedish news site that the site outages were the result of a technical issue, rather than the police’s seizure of servers. And it’s not yet clear exactly whose servers the police seized: PRQ’s two thousand or so customers have at times included WikiLeaks, the North America Man-Boy Love Association, Pedophile.se, the Chechen rebel site Kavkaz Central, and the defamation-accused Italian blog known as Perugia Shock, among others.

• [Manuel Smirnoff]

  I used to think Sweden was cool. Then the Assange thing, and now this. Now they just act like morons. 

  Sorry, Swedes.

  • [teapot]

    Just ignore the fact that tpb was created by Swedes in Sweden and that the Pirate Party movement started there.. Other than that: Screw you, fascist Swedes!!!!!!!!!1!

    • [davidasposted]

      I think it is fair to assume from context that Manuel is referring to the Swedish government. More, he did not describe the government as fascist. Make your point in a more elegant way.

      • [teapot]

        “Sorry, Swedes” ← The thing with words is that they actually mean stuff.

        My point, which you seem to have missed entirely, was that as far as countries go Sweden is pretty staunch on protecting personal liberty and it seems like this everyday occurrence (company accused of supporting piracy gets raided and servers confiscated) is being completely overblown because of the particular parties involved (tpb, Sweden) and not because of objective or balanced outrage.

        Yes – this is not a very cool move, and I’m not arguing that. What I’m saying is I don’t remember masses of people acting with such incredulity when the US government pressed the Kiwis to break NZ law in order to seize servers and arrest Kim Dotcom. That was par for the course and maybe people are responding more in this case because they expect better of Sweden, but the fact remains that we’d probably all live more freely there than in our respective countries and so it looks pretty silly when we are telling them to be better.

        If my sarcastic, excited exclamation marks weren’t clue enough; I don’t do elegant.

        • [bzishi]

          Based on Sweden’s record of protecting privacy rights, they deserve the benefit of the doubt. But remember, Sweden is a very small country (1/30th the population of the US). If this does turn out to be an attack on free speech, the significance will be greater due to their small population and the erosion of their high standard of privacy rights.

        • [Boundegar]

          If I recall, we had a Swedish commenter on a related story, who said his government was fairly notorious for being in the pocket of corporate interests.  It was sad.

        • [Manuel Smirnoff]

          Read Boundegar, below, for the meaning of “Sorry, Swedes.”

        • [dragonfrog]

          “Sorry, Swedes” ← The thing with words is that they actually mean stuff.

          Yes, and in this case, “Sorry Swedes” means an apology to the people of Sweden, for certain preceding comments.  Which were about “Sweden,” not “Swedes.”  Which could be interpreted to mean the landmass, the people, the government, the constitutional entity, or the album by the Mountain Goats (had to check the WP disambiguation page for that one).  I wonder which makes more sense in this context, given that it’s a discussion about actions taken by the Swedish justice system, which is a branch of government.

          Also – people are getting more excited about this than the Dotcom fiasco in NZ?  Which people have you noticed getting more excited?  Are they Swedish?  This is the first I’ve heard of the story, and 12 hours after the fact, the BB thread has all of 16 posts on it, and very little hand wringing.

• [LogrusZed]

  I don’t know what kind of technical problems would be causing all the proxies I have listed to be down as well.

  • [Mistre Brightside]

    It doesn’t matter if you are behind over 9000 proxies. It won’t connect if the server itself (that hosts the website and the files you are trying to connect to) is down!

    • [LogrusZed]

      Proxy hosts, not me behind the meme proxies. Mirrors might be more apt terminology. A bunch of sites began to d/l and mirror the TPB database after the last DDOS.

• [Petzl]

  If Pirate Bay goes down, then truly the terrorists have won.

• [Michael David Stillings]

  i havent felt like this since 911…..a part of me is lost. truly this is a sad day

• [AriesAries Aries]

  Man… It is a sad day indeed.

• [JimEJim]

  http://torrentfreak.com/prq-police-raid-takes-down-dozens-of-file-sharing-sites-121001/

  According to torrentfreak, Pirate Bay is down for unrelated reasons and isn’t hosted there anymore.

• [noah django]

  fuck this hetero earth

• [Nathan Hornby]

  Eugh.

  On a positive note I’ve seen a lot of free Julian Assange posters about my town recently – which is a relatively small town, and certainly not particularly politically active, in a visual way at least.

  People are irked.  They’ll only stay irked for so long.

  From my perspective it feels like the government (and I mean that collectively, across many western nations) represents its people a little less every year, it won’t be long until they’re just another enemy.

  • [Adam Greenfield]

    Well, corporations are now people, so maybe government is representing them more every year.

    • [Nathan Hornby]

      Heh, that is a bit of a mind bender!

• [Sparg]

  Thanks for the update.  Wondering why I couldn’t connect.