There are a handful of traditions we have at TorrentFreak, and remembering the first raid on The Pirate Bay is one of them.
Not only was it the first major story we covered, it also had a significant impact on how the piracy ecosystem evolved over the years. It also changed the lives of the site’s co-founders, who were eventually convicted.
While a lot has changed over the years, The Pirate Bay is still around and there are no signs that this will change anytime soon. What many people may not realize, however, is that without a few essential keystrokes in the site’s early years, the site would be a distant memory today.
This is what happened.
May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. The Swedish police had instructions to shut down the Pirate Bay’s servers as part of a criminal probe, following pressure from the US Government.
As the police were about to enter the datacenter, Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij knew that something wasn’t quite right. In the months prior, both men noticed they were being tailed by private investigators, but this time their servers were the target.
At around 10:00 in the morning, Gottfrid told Fredrik that there were police officers at their office. He asked his colleague to get down to the co-location facility and get rid of the ‘incriminating evidence’ although none of it – whatever it was – was related to The Pirate Bay.
A Crucial Backup
As Fredrik was leaving, he suddenly realized that the problems might be linked to their torrent tracker. Just in case, he decided to make a full backup of the site.
When he later arrived at the co-location facility, those concerns turned out to be justified. There were dozens of police officers floating around taking away dozens of servers, most of which belonged to clients unrelated to The Pirate Bay.
In the days that followed, it became clear that Fredrik’s decision to create a backup of the site was probably the most pivotal moment in the site’s history. Because of this backup, Fredrik and the rest of the Pirate Bay team managed to resurrect the site within three days.
“The Police Bay”
Of course, the entire situation was handled with the mockery TPB had become known for.
Unimpressed, the site’s operators renamed the site “The Police Bay”, complete with a new logo shooting cannonballs at Hollywood. A few days later this logo was replaced by a Phoenix, a reference to the site rising from its digital ashes.
Instead of shutting it down, the raid propelled The Pirate Bay into the mainstream press, not least due to its swift resurrection. The publicity also triggered a huge traffic spike for TPB, exactly the opposite effect Hollywood had hoped for.
The US Pushed Sweden
Although the raid and the subsequent criminal investigation were carried out in Sweden, the US Government played a major role behind the scenes. For many years the scale of that involvement was unknown. However, information obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request in 2017 helped to fill in some blanks.
The trail started with a cable sent from the US Embassy in Sweden to Washington in November 2005, roughly six months before the Pirate Bay raid. The Embassy wrote that Hollywood’s MPA met with US Ambassador Bivins and, separately, with the Swedish State Secretary of Justice. The Pirate Bay was one of the top agenda items.
“The MPA is particularly concerned about PirateBay, the world‘s largest Torrent file-sharing tracker. According to the MPA and based on Embassy’s follow-up discussions, the Justice Ministry is very interested in a constructive dialogue with the US. on these concerns,” the cable read.
The Embassy explained that Hollywood would like Sweden to take action against a big player such as The Pirate Bay.
“We have yet to see a ‘big fish’ tried – something the MPA badly wants to see, particularly in light of the fact that Sweden hosts the largest Bit Torrent file-sharing tracker in the world, ‘Pirate-Bay’, which openly flaunts IPR,” the cable writer commented.
Fast forward half a year and indeed, 65 police officers were ready to take The Pirate Bay’s servers offline. While there is no written evidence that the US officials were actively involved in planning the investigation or raid, indirectly they played a major role.
TPB Takedown Award
This is also backed up by further evidence. In a cable sent in April 2007, the Embassy nominated one of its employees, whose name is redacted, for the State Department’s Foreign Service National (FSN) of the year award. Again, The Pirate Bay case was cited.
“REDACTED skillful outreach directly led to a bold decision by Swedish law enforcement authorities to raid Pirate Bay and shut it down. This was recognized as a major achievement in Washington in furthering U.S. efforts to combat Internet piracy worldwide.”
We don’t know if the employee in question received his or her award. In hindsight, however, the raid did very little to deter piracy.
The Aftermath
The swift and deviant comeback turned the site’s founders into heroes for many. The site made headline news around the world and in Stockholm, people were waving pirate flags in the streets, a sentiment that benefited the newly founded Pirate Party as well.
The raid eventually resulted in negative consequences for the site’s founders. It was the start of a criminal investigation, which led to a trial, and prison sentences for several of the site’s key players.
This became another turning point. Many of the people who were involved from the early days decided to cut their ties with the site, which was handed over to a more anonymous group.
The outspokenness of the early years is gone today and it’s a mystery who currently pulls the strings. What we do know is that The Pirate Bay is still seen as a piracy icon by many. And the current operator will probably do everything he can to keep the site online, just like on May 31, 2006.
