Latest developments from Sweden, June 4.:
400,000 Swedes in Antipiracy Bureau's secret register
There's a new piracy-related scandal brewing in Sweden. Newspaper Aftonbladet
reports that Antipiratbyrån, the Swedish antipiracy organization, is keeping a secret encrypted register in its Stockholm offices holding detailed records of the download activities of some 400,000 Swedes. Such registers are illegal in Sweden, where personal privacy is highly appreciated by the law and guarded by state officials. Göran Gräslund, the director of Swedish Data Inspection office has promised to take a closer look at the issue. "Antipiratbyrån having the IP addresses of people in encrypted form is unlikely to make any legal difference", he says. "The personal information is still there and can be decoded back to plaintext as wished."
Swedish press siding with people in the "Net War"
Despite the approaching FIFA World Cup football tournament (a big media event in Europe), it is the unfolding piracy drama that has captured the main headlines in the Swedish press. The press is showing little or no sympathy to Antipiratbyrån and to the media cartels financing its operations. The online reader forums of the newspapers are filling up with hundreds of furious posts from the readers protesting the illegal police action against Pirate Bay and demanding the resigning of the Justice Minister Thomas Bodström who seems to have been the key official to fold under the pressure from the U.S. government and the American movie cartel MPAA.
Government website comes back online, police website still down
The web portal of the Swedish government came back online this morning, bringing some relief to the various Swedish officials who need it to access their respective data systems. The website of the Swedish Police is still down under a continuing DDoS attack. Earlier yesterday Antipiratbyrån voluntarily went offline, obviously to avoid an inevitable crashing or worse under the attacks coming from the Internet.