Today, several servers belonging to the Swedish Pirate Party have been the target of so-called DDoS attacks. The attacks began early morning at 3 AM, after the party had set up a Swedish mirror copy of the WikiLeaks website. The party’s reason for doing so is that WikiLeaks, whose leaks to the media are in the limelight, has been attacked from multiple vectors and needed help to stay online.

– We have been spared this kind of attacks before, says Anna Troberg, deputy party leader of the Swedish Pirate Party. Therefore, it is hard to not see a connection between these attacks and the party’s support for WikiLeaks’ activism in support of democracy. At the same time, the attacks make it clear that WikiLeaks’ work for transparency is needed more than ever.

Technically, a DDoS attack (”Distributed Denial of Service”) means that a large number of requests are sent to a server in order to overwhelm it, to make it not cope with the incoming flood of work and respond slugglishly or not at all.

– In practice, this means that our political work is hindered, continues Troberg. Several of our internal systems and external information channels have been affected by the attacks, and it complicates our work considerably, and perhaps worst of all, our ability to communicate political ideas.

The Pirate Party is deeply concerned about the incident. The right to engage in political work must not be tampered with. Unfortunately, the past week has shown that freedom of expression and transparency cannot be taken for granted:

– Those who have chosen to bluntly criticize the important work of WikiLeaks, well, they should consider what their attitude towards transparency means in practice. For example, it makes free political speech very difficult, which is an unacceptable situation in any democracy, Troberg says.

For more information:

Anna Troberg, Deputy Party Leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, +46 10 3333 402
Rick Falkvinge, Party Leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, +46 10 3333 401
Pirate Party Press Center for photos, logo, and other resources: http://press.piratpartiet.se/