Shady WikiLeaks And Pirate Bay Web Host PRQ Has Been Raided



The Swedish web host PeRiQuito AB, PRQ, is one of the most controversial web hosts on the planet, valuing free speech so highly that it serves up web content for Pirate Bay, WikiLeaks and even sites like Pedophile.se. Yesterday, though, Swedish police paid a visit.

Forbes reports that Stockholm police raided the company yesterday. The process brought about technical issues for PQR, which shut down its own website and a swathe of torrent sites like Pirate Bay, but the police also seized a number of servers.

It’s currently not clear which servers were taken. There’re certainly plenty to choose from: among PQR’s 2,000-or-so customers are WikiLeaks, the North America Man-Boy Love Association, Pedophile.se, the Chechen rebel site Kavkaz Central, and the defamation-accused Italian blog known as Perugia Shock.

PQR was founded by Pirate Bay members back in 2004, and has been raided by police twice before: in 2006 to gain evidence about Pirate Bay and 2010 during a more general file sharing investigation. The nature of the PQR business — a no-questions-asked set-up where clients often remain anonymous — means that even it doesn’t know why the raid happened yet. [Nyheter24 via Forbes]