Swedish Pirate Party Launches Own Pirate ISP
Promises to protect customer anonymity. News follows recent development whereby it began offering Swedish BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay bandwidth from the Swedish Parliament.
The Swedish Pirate Party is entering the country’s domestic broadband market with plans to set up a new network provider called Pirate ISP.
So far the service has been beta tested for a few weeks now in the city of Lund with less than a hundred residents of LKF, low-income municipal-owned residences. It will be open to the public sometime in September, and after it reaches 5% of the market share there it has big plans to expand around the country.
“We want to take five percent of the market to begin with,” says Gustav Nipe, president of the Pirate ISP. “This we believe is not unreasonable. Then we have other contracts in the pipeline, which allows us to spread ourselves in other places in the country depending on how it works here.”
The main mission of Pirate ISP is to deliver Internet services while maintaining the Pirate Party principles, particularly anonymity of user traffic. How it plans to do that Nipe refused to reveal.
“It is a pity to reveal all the tricks that exist, that we save for later,” added Nipe.“But we have ways to ensure that no customer should have to get a sad letter home from Henrik Pontén.”
However, Pontén, head lawyer of the country’s Anti-Piracy Office, dismissed Pirate ISP’s plans for absolute anonymity, and said that it wouldn’t impact the efforts of law enforcement.
“Anonymity has never been an issue in our work,” he says. ” Our investigations have focused on people with much higher safety. The question has been up a thousand times before. When calling the police, they must disclose the information.”
He also told nril.tv that he will refuse to maintain the data logs of customers, and that if the govt tries to stop it “they will then have to stop a political party in Sweden and then they will have a parliamentary issue.”
Nipe said the idea for Pirate ISP came after a discussion with some and friends and he over coffee this past Spring. After all the trouble they’ve had with convincing ISPs to defend the anonymity of customers they decided the best approach would be to do it themselves.
It’s part of a new paradigm shift for The Pirate Party which seems to be taking an aggressive new tack in its bid to protect online freedom and civil liberties. This past May it became the broadband provider of The Pirate Bay, taking the “bull by the horns” and delivering bandwidth for the BitTorrent tracker site’s home page and search engine function directly from the Swedish Parliament.
Stay tuned.
Promises to protect customer anonymity. News follows recent development whereby it began offering Swedish BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay bandwidth from the Swedish Parliament.
The Swedish Pirate Party is entering the country’s domestic broadband market with plans to set up a new network provider called Pirate ISP.
So far the service has been beta tested for a few weeks now in the city of Lund with less than a hundred residents of LKF, low-income municipal-owned residences. It will be open to the public sometime in September, and after it reaches 5% of the market share there it has big plans to expand around the country.
“We want to take five percent of the market to begin with,” says Gustav Nipe, president of the Pirate ISP. “This we believe is not unreasonable. Then we have other contracts in the pipeline, which allows us to spread ourselves in other places in the country depending on how it works here.”
The main mission of Pirate ISP is to deliver Internet services while maintaining the Pirate Party principles, particularly anonymity of user traffic. How it plans to do that Nipe refused to reveal.
“It is a pity to reveal all the tricks that exist, that we save for later,” added Nipe.“But we have ways to ensure that no customer should have to get a sad letter home from Henrik Pontén.”However, Pontén, head lawyer of the country’s Anti-Piracy Office, dismissed Pirate ISP’s plans for absolute anonymity, and said that it wouldn’t impact the efforts of law enforcement.
“Anonymity has never been an issue in our work,” he says. ” Our investigations have focused on people with much higher safety. The question has been up a thousand times before. When calling the police, they must disclose the information.”
He also told nril.tv that he will refuse to maintain the data logs of customers, and that if the govt tries to stop it “they will then have to stop a political party in Sweden and then they will have a parliamentary issue.”
Nipe said the idea for Pirate ISP came after a discussion with some and friends and he over coffee this past Spring. After all the trouble they’ve had with convincing ISPs to defend the anonymity of customers they decided the best approach would be to do it themselves.
It’s part of a new paradigm shift for The Pirate Party which seems to be taking an aggressive new tack in its bid to protect online freedom and civil liberties. This past May it became the broadband provider of The Pirate Bay, taking the “bull by the horns” and delivering bandwidth for the BitTorrent tracker site’s home page and search engine function directly from the Swedish Parliament.
Stay tuned.