Swedish Pirate Party to host Wikileaks servers

The Swedish Pirate Party has agreed with Wikileaks to host several new servers and provide the site bandwidth for free, it said on Tuesday.

The servers will be up and running in a few days, and will be located at an undisclosed place somewhere in Sweden, according to Anna Troberg, deputy party leader for the Pirate Party. Some of Wikileaks' servers are already hosted in Sweden by hosting company PRQ.

Wikileaks has come under severe criticism from the U.S. military for recently publishing thousands of documents related to the campaign in Afghanistan and has taken steps to ensure its infrastructure for hosting documents is robust and distributed.

This is the second time that the Pirate Party has announced it will help a controversial Web site. In May, the Pirate Party said it would provide bandwidth for the Pirate Bay file-sharing site after a German court injunction temporarily left the site without a bandwidth provider.

The Pirate Party has seen its popularity dwindle since it won 7.1 percent of the votes in elections for the European Parliament last year.

The polls ahead of the Sept. 19 Swedish general elections include the Pirate Party together with other smaller political parties, which collectively garner only 1.9 percent of the vote, said a spokesman at market research company TNS SIFO.

Four percent is needed to get into the parliament, but the Pirate Party is counting on a strong finish, Troberg said. The agreement with Wikileaks should help increase support from the public for the party, she said.

The Pirate Party isn't the only Swedish organization that has started working with Wikileaks.

Recently, WikiLeaks also started using Swedish micropayment platform Flattr, which allows users to pay a flat fee every month and then share a portion of that money as a donation for content on Web sites that have a Flattr button.

Send news tips and comments to mikael_ricknas@idg.com

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