December last year The Pirate Bay went dark after police raided the Nacka station, a nuclear-proof datacenter built into a mountain complex.
Around the same time one of Pirate Bay’s moderators was arrested, fueling the idea that the site had been seriously compromised.
The events resulted in the longest ever period of downtime for the site, nearly two months, and led to a revolt among the site’s moderators.
While it was generally believed that Pirate Bay needed time to recover the site from various backups, The TPB team now says that this was not the case. In fact, Pirate Bay’s servers were never raided by the police.
The police did raid the Nacka datacenter but instead of Pirate Bay’s servers they raided those of EZTV. Sladinki007 of the former EZTV team confirmed that their hardware was indeed taken, but the Pirate Bay team says they were barely hit.
Only one Pirate Bay related server was confiscated last December, which was hosted at a different location. This (crew.thepiratebay.org) was operated by the moderators and used as a communication channel for TPB matters.
The Pirate Bay team believes that it may not have been the prime target of last year’s raid, and if they were, then the police followed the wrong lead. Pirate Bay’s servers were and are hosted in the cloud, outside of Sweden.
But if TPB wasn’t raided, why did it have to go offline?
According to the TPB team they decided to pull everything offline as a precaution. It was unclear how much information was held on the crew server and if there was a breach of trust after one of the moderators was arrested.
The TPB team feared that the locations of the servers could have been compromised as well and prepared to move everything over to new cloud hosting providers.
Relocating the site proved to be harder than initially anticipated though. In fact, technical challenges were one of the main reasons for the long downtime. All the data was there, it just had to be setup correctly. So, at the same time the team decided to revise the backend code to better handle the new cloud environment.
The lack of data loss already became apparent when the site returned online in February, as all recent torrents and comments were still there.
TF also asked about the cryptic messages TPB communicated during the downtime, and we were informed that they were put there “for fun.” The messages were not a way to communicate with people, but simply a link to a Arnold Schwarzenegger “i’ll be back” montage video on YouTube.
In addition to The Pirate Bay, several related sites including Bayimg, Bayfiles and Pastebay also went dark. These sites are still offline today and we are informed that this is an issue of ‘resources’ and ‘priorities,’ not because any data is missing.
So why reveal all this now?
The TPB team says it waited this long to make sure that they were not compromised in any way. This was also the main reason why the site’s moderators were left in the dark for such a long time and why the Suprbay forums remained offline.
Since more than nine months have now passed, it’s finally time to reveal what really happened. Police may still believe that they have the encrypted Pirate Bay servers, but according to the people behind the site they have nothing substantial.
Given today’s revelations it’s unlikely that the raid will help police to mount a new case against The Pirate Bay, as they were planning. Time will tell whether the authorities will try to hit the site again.
Update: Pirate Bay now links to this article from the frontpage.
