A Swedish Internet company linked to file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay says it’s helping online whistle-blower WikiLeaks release classified documents from servers located in a Stockholm suburb.
Mikael Viborg, the owner of the Web hosting company PRQ, on Friday showed The Associated Press the site — the basement of a drab office building — in Solna on the condition that the exact location was not revealed.
“This is the office. The server room is further inside,” the 28-year-old Viborg said, with the door to the office cracked open. Desks with computers, documents, and empty pastry boxes and soda cans could be seen inside before he closed the door.
WikiLeaks posted more than 76,900 classified military and other documents, mostly raw intelligence reports from Afghanistan, on its Web site July 25. The White House angrily denounced the leaks, saying they put the lives of Afghan informants and U.S. troops at risk.
The secretive Web site gives few details about its setup, but says its “servers are distributed over multiple international jurisdictions and do not keep logs. Hence these logs cannot be seized.”
Viborg said WikiLeaks has servers outside Sweden, too.
“There are backups,” he said. “If one goes down, there are others that take over.”
Viborg said he was comfortable revealing the location in Solna because Swedish authorities already know where it is and have not tried to shut down the servers.
“Not so far,” Viborg said. “First I thought it was a bit surprising. But when you look at the legal situation it’s hard to see that Swedish authorities can tell us to do anything, legally.
“They can ask us to do it out of goodwill, but I can tell you right now that we won’t oblige.”
Swedish Foreign Ministry spokesman Anders Jorle said the government had not been contacted by the United States about the WikiLeaks servers and had…