The Stockholm-based web host PeRiQuito AB, or PRQ, has long attracted some of the most controversial sites on the Internet. Now it’s attracted a less friendly guest: Sweden’s police force.
Stockholm police raided the free-speech focused firm Monday and took four of its servers, the company’s owner Mikael Viborg told the Swedish news outlet Nyheter24.
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.
“Even though I loathe what they say, I defend them,” Viborg told me when we spoke last August, regarding his most controversial clients like Pedophile.se and NAMBLA. “We don’t cooperate with the authorities unless we absolutely have to.”
As of last summer, Viborg said that PRQ continued to host WikiLeaks. But he told me that the company no longer had any direction connection with the Pirate Bay, which has instead bounced among temporary hosts since its founders were convicted of copyright theft in 2010.
Two of the three Pirate Bay founders also created PRQ in 2004, and one of them is Gottfrid Svartholm, a 27-year old Swede who was arrested in Cambodia last month after being convicted of copyright crimes in absentia, and is now also being charged with hacking into the IT firm Logica.
PRQ has been raided twice before: In 2006, to gather evidence in the police investigation of the Pirate Bay, and again in 2010, in an operation targeting a filesharing network known as “the Scene.”
WikiLeaks noted the raid in its Twitter feed Monday, describing PRQ as “one of a number of ISPs used by WikiLeaks.” But as of Monday afternoon, the secret-spilling site hadn’t been taken offline.
As I learn more about the PRQ raid, I’ll post an update. For now, even PRQ’s owners may not know the reason behind the raid. Viborg has told me that the company has a policy of no-questions-asked service for many of its customers, even accepting cash payments up front to avoid requiring any bank payment details that might identify its server room’s inhabitants. “Generally we don’t know who our customers are,” Viborg said. “By Swedish law, we’re not required to.”
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