Anyone who’s ever visited The Pirate Bay (or “TPB”) knows that the site experiences occasional outages that can last for several hours at a time. But for more than 24 hours, The Pirate Bay’s main website (linked to here) has been inaccessible. It appears that The Pirate Bay is experiencing a radically different kind of censorship than what the site has experienced in the past.
Despite far-reaching, broad ISP blockades in Europe, which have limited access to the heavily-trafficked torrent site, the most recent TPB outage does not seem to be the result of government or corporate forces; rather, this outage comes on the heels of The Pirate Bay’s open denouncement of Anonymous’s DDoS attack against UK-based internet service provider (ISP) Virgin Media last week. And so the plot thickens.
There’s a lot of convincing evidence which places blame for Wednesday’s outage on members of the Anonymous hacker collective, which is to say that Anonymous had an axe to grind against The Pirate Bay. The origins of this month-old beef between two organizations which, arguably, have similar goals, takes us to the UK earlier this month. UK courts mandated that ISPs implement an across-the-board block on domains owned by The Pirate Bay.
Virgin Media was the first ISP to implement the blockade, and Anons launched a concerted DDoS attack on May 8th against the company’s web properties, interrupting service for the better part of a day. Why did Anonymous do this? Someone tweeted from the AnonUK Twitter account, announcing that:
#Anonymous have just taken down#VirginMediawebsite again because of their involvement in the#Censorship of The Pirate Bay#TPB#OpTPB
So herein lies the origin of the conflict between Anonymous and The Pirate Bay. While both organizations have similar end goals in mind – freer access to information and government reform, among others – they have wildly divergent strategies for achieving those goals. Anonymous’s pugilistic tack rubs The Pirate Bay the wrong way.
While Anonymous engages in DDoS takedowns, The Pirate Bay has spawned its own worldwide political movement; so-called Pirate Parties have sprung up in places including Germany, Sweden and California. Pirate Parites engage the political system through advocacy and political campaigns (some of which have been successful) to change policies from within. The division between Anonymous and The Pirate Bay is one between righteous aggression and more pacifist political advocacy (if not outright diplomacy).
TPB made its position clear in a May 8th post to their Facebook page:
We do NOT encourage these actions. We believe in the open and free internets, where anyone can express their views. Even if we strongly disagree with them and even if they hate us.
So don’t fight them using their ugly methods. DDOS and blocks are both forms of censorship.
Them’s fightin’ words. TBP, an anti-censorship organization above all else, is calling out Anonymous, another group with an anti-censorship message, for using censorship to achieve their goals. Basically, TPB called Anonymous a bunch of hypocrites.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, TPB announced on its Facebook page that it was under DDoS attack, and that it “had its suspicions” about the culprit.
And here’s the plot twist. While finishing my initial research for this piece, I expected to find some kind of evidence that Anonymous was responsible for The Pirate Bay outage. DDoS attacks are Anonymous’s MO. But no such luck. A Twitter search for the hashtag #TPB contains messages of solidarity from Anons.
The BBC just published a story containing an interview with Andre Stewart of Corero Network Security, which provides DDoS defense systems to companies. He said this attack is not likely from Anonymous. He mentioned the tacit alliance between the two organizations, but was not clear about other reasons why he thought Anonymous wasn’t responsible. He did, however, say:
It could be the record labels, or a government somewhere that has had enough of not being able to catch The Pirate Bay, it could be just one person who had rented some cloud power from Amazon and is sitting in a cafe, and is able to launch an attack.
So I guess this leaves us at a bit of a cliffhanger. Nobody really knows where, or who the attack came from, so it’s difficult to pin down a motive. When I started this, I thought it’d end up being a scandalous story of piracy, subterfuge and inter-organization conflict, but in many ways this messy, mysterious note on which the story for now ends is perhaps more fitting, since both organizations operate on the messy, mysterious underside of the internet.
We will keep you updated as this story develops.
Update — As of Thursday morning, The Pirate Bay’s website seems to be up and running.
