Swedish Pirate Party members launch anonymous, log-free ISP

By Jacqui Cheng

Sweden's Pirate Party wants to continue defending people's "right to act politically," and now some of its members have decided take its ideals a step further than just hosting The Pirate Bay on its own servers. Two members of the political Piratpartiet have big plans to launch its own ISP that delivers service in line with the party's ideals. It won't be like your standard ISP, though: the Pirate ISP founders say that users will be responsible for fixing and maintaining their service, and that privacy will be one of its highest priorities.

"If you see something and you think it’s broken you build a patch and fix it. With that as a reference point we are launching an ISP. This is one way to tackle the Big Brother society," Pirate ISP CEO and Pirate Party member Gustav Nipe told TorrentFreak in an interview. "The Pirate ISP is needed in different ways. One is to compete with other ISPs, let them fight more for our Internet. If they don’t behave there will always be someone else taking their share."

Pirate ISP subscribers will be able to use the service anonymously thanks to ViaEuropa, the same company that powers the Pirate Bay's anonymous VPN service, iPredator. Nipe also said during the Hacknight conference that Pirate ISP won't allow the government to monitor users. The ISP downright refuses to keep logs.

This will surely be an annoyance to record companies—particularly those in the US—not to mention Sweden's Anti-Piracy Bureau, but Nipe doesn't seem to care. "They can bring on whatever they have," he said.

Pirate ISP subscribers will be able to use such services with abandon—at least until the anti-piracy bureau gets involved. Henrik Pontén at the Svenska Antipiratbyrån made it clear that he's not intimidated by Nipe's chest-thumping and said that the ISP will have to fork over the same info as everyone else when the police show up at the door, though it's unclear how that will happen if the ISP has no logs to hand over.

The service has already begun beta testing in Lund and the company hopes to expand the service to the rest of Sweden within months, so subscribers will find out soon enough who's talking the talk and who's walking the walk when it comes to respecting user privacy.