Swedish Pirate Party Decided to Become ISP for WikiLeaks

After its successful suggestion to host the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker on the country’s Parliament servers, the Pirate Party is now offering the same safe haven to whistleblower website WikiLeaks, promising it both bandwidth and server space in case it’s attacked as well.

Anna Troberg, the leader of Swedish Pirate Party, doesn’t fear to put her party at the forefront of online war over free speech. The news is that the Pirate Party is looking ahead, deciding to offer a whistleblower site WikiLeaks its help with bandwidth and server space in case it’s also attacked like it happened to The Pirate Bay.

At the moment Wikileaks is hosted with the Swedish company PRQ, operated by the Pirate Bay profiles – Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm, known for being co-founders of the BitTorrent site who got banned from running it. Perhaps it’s one of the reasons why Wikileaks is now under permanent attack. It wouldn’t be a surprise for anyone if the country is shortly subjected to American pressure to close Wikileaks. As they have been doing the same towards The Pirate Bay, it must be just a matter of time before the site is attacked.

It will now be up to the Swedish government – whether it chooses to stand up on democracy and Wikileaks, or give way for the United States and go after the PRQ and the website.

WikiLeaks, as you might remember, is renowned for release of 91,000 American military documents containing secret data about the war in Afghanistan. The service believes that in a free country access to information, especially that the government doesn’t want citizens to have, is extremely important for people to be able to make a really informed decision before voting. Anna Troberg highlights that WikiLeaks is just a new way to distribute information, in addition to traditional methods like newspapers or TV, but WikiLeaks is different because it doesn’t need to hire editors with iron nerves to report any major revelations. The service doesn’t work under the same limitations as compared to traditional media, but rather treats truth more seriously.

The offer made by the Pirate Party of Sweden to WikiLeaks is following its efforts to keep data free of government censors. Last month the Party launched its own service provider named Pirate ISP and began offering bandwidth to the BitTorrent tracker from inside the Parliament, claiming its major principle to be anonymity of file-sharers traffic.