19.8.2006
Jonas Birgersson, the man behind Relakks, talks
Jonas Birgersson, the managing director of stock-listed company Labs2, is the man behind the new pirate service Relakks that makes possible anonymous filesharing. The service got world famous practically in a day with the special promotional help from the Swedish Pirates.
"As I see it, it is not filesharing that is important", says Birgersson in an
interview to di.se, "but rather the access to the entire Internet without limitations on the information being accessed or software being used, and without fear of retaliation."
Jonas Birgersson sees three reasons why Relakks is needed.
First reason is that in countries like Iran and China the access to Internet is censored. With services like Relakks people can get access to all information on Internet.
Second reason is that in many countries, e.g. in USA, service providers block access to certain services on the net for commercial reasons. For example they may prevent their customers from using other IP-telephone operators.
Third reason are the cases of compromised privacy like AOL's recent misjudged releasing of log files that revealed surfing habits of individual customers. "Relakks opens the possibility to give a better service to Americans, with high security and the house in order", says Birgersson.
But is it not enough for service providers in China, Iran and USA just to block all traffic to Relakks servers and thereby prevent their customers from using the service? "We have checked this from the earlier providers of similar services, even if they offered only narrowband services, and we concluded that it is not so difficult to stay a step ahead of the censors."
There is already a lot of speculation on the net whether Relakks will evolve into a safe haven for serious criminals, terrorists and pedophiles. "Relakks nor any other Swedish Internet service is a free zone for serious criminality. Any crime punishable with minimum two years of jail gives the police access to traffic data from Relakks as from any other Swedish operator." Birgersson also wants to point out that there is already a block list in use in Sweden for child porn sites. All Swedish operators obey this list, and so does also Relakks.
As the service is prepaid, just like a prepaid phone card, Relakks is not allowed to collect any other information than what the customer has given. If the police requests for information about a specific customer, Relakks has nothing else to give but the information given by the customer herself.
When asked whether this is a calculated approach, so that there would be as little information to give as possible, Birgersson says: "No. When we started figuring out Relakks service, we opted for prepayment mainly to minimize credit risks. We also understand that there are users who are nervous to give out their social security numbers. And as we have customers from the entire world, there would be no way to control such numbers anyway."
And why the co-operation with Pirate Party?
"It is in our plans to create a partner program where we would reward anybody finding us new customers with a few crowns. Pirate Party was simply the first and the fastest partner to do that, but later on we will have also other partners from other directions."