Monday was another important day in the ongoing battle between the government of Sweden and the supporters and allies of Julian Assange, Wikileaks, and The Pirate Bay, with virtual blood being drawn on both sides.

Sweden, where The Pirate Bay (TPB) is based, recently had the Cambodian government arrest and deport Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, co-founder of the popular torrent site. He is now in a Swedish jail, held without bail and unable to contact anyone, even a lawyer. Assange supporters fear the same fate for the WikiLeaks founder, should he surrender to Swedish authorities for questioning about allegations of sexual misconduct. Assange runs the added risk of being extradited to the U.S., where he has been labeled an “enemy of the state” on the same level as a senior member of Al Qaeda.

Monday, Swedish police raided PRQ, an Internet service provider that was founded by the same men as The Pirate Bay. According to the WikiLeaks Twitter account, it is only “one of a number of ISPs used by WikiLeaks,” and the WikiLeaks site itself was not affected. PRQ hosts many file-sharing sites, but not TPB itself.

Police seized four servers, knocking out dozens of sites in the process. According to @AnonIRC, it was part of a coordinated series of raids across as many as 14 European countries, with multiple Swedish sites targeted. Police refused to identify the targets of the raids specifically, although Prosecutor Frederick Ingblad told Expressen.se that WikiLeaks itself was not among them.

Meanwhile, TPB was also offline, although staffers there laid the blame on a power failure due to a Power Distribution Unit, essentially an industrial-level power bar, although one with computerized components. TPB is still offline as this article is posted. The possibility exists that malware designed to target PDU’s is responsible; it would in that case be similar to the Stuxnet and Flame attacks which have been attributed to the U.S. and Israeli governments.

When something goes wrong with TPB, something is sure to go wrong with its enemies, particularly recently. Naturally, the rumor mill laid the blame on the government. Within a couple of hours, a Facebook event for #OpPirateBay was up and inviting over two thousand interested parties to “fire lazorz” (meaning LOICs, the software for DDoS attacks) at a list of Swedish government targets.

For bonus lulz, Anonymous Squad No. 035 posted fifteen Chinese government sites that had also been hacked, although a connection to Sweden or TPB is not immediately clear.

Earlier, a massive and highly successful botnet attack had been launched against numerous Swedish government sites—some critical, some trivial—as well as against certain high-profile civilian targets like Swedbank and the national train reservation system.

Anders Ahlqvist, an IT expert at the National Police Board, explained to The Local, “Attacks of this kind have always been carried out against government agencies, organizations and companies. There doesn’t seem to be a plan behind it. If they are firing against the police or the prosecution authority it is a bit more understandable, but attacking the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brottsförebyggande rådet – Brå) and the Swedish Courts is more inexplicable.”

AFP also quoted Ahlqvist as saying, “Every time something happens in the Assange affair there are more attacks on the Internet in Sweden.” Assange apparently did not appreciate being singled out by a military spokesperson as the justification for the botnet attacks, and the WikiLeaks Twitter feed sniped at Sweden for the allegation, which then made its way around Twitter on the #Wikileaks and #Anonymous hashtags for hundreds of retweets.

All this excitement comes immediately after Sunday’s successful PR initiative, in which Assange invited a Daily Mail journalist to tour his Knightsbridge embassy bedsit, which he described as “like living in a space station.” The interview was friendly, quirky, and significantly more sympathetic on a personal basis than the British press has typically been towards the WikiLeaks founder.

And in an appeal to the “this is how they waste our taxes” crowd, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed quoted London Mayor Boris Johnson on the cost of the Ecuadorian embassy siege by the police. “Sweden’s recalcitrance over Assange has now cost the UK more than £1.1 million in embassy siege costs alone according to mayor Boris Johnson,” they said, an unusual and ostentatious extravagance for a Conservative/Liberal Democrat government which touts its fiscal prudence.

Of course, nobody knows the real cost of an international cyberwar, but the governments of Sweden and possibly the U.K. could be in a position to find out very quickly.

Image via Anonsquad No. 035/http://www.dbegs.gov.cn/