The Pirate Bay to Add SSL Encryption Starting this Week

Comes in response to recent passage of a law allowing all e-mails and phone calls to be monitored in the name of national security.

The Pirate Bay, one of the world's largest BitTorrent tracker sites, is once again at the forefront of privacy rights in Sweden with news that it plans to add SSL encryption to the site in response to recent legislation allowing the National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) to begin monitoring all outgoing and incoming communications that cross Sweden's borders.

Now the new spying powers won't mean that much for people outside Sweden because The Pirate Bay's servers have long been scattered throughout the world to prevent another shutdown of the site by Swedish authorities.

But, many are rightly upset over the enhanced powers given to the FRA, which is currently only allowed to monitor military radio communications, since it will simply mean that a supercomputer searches for easily circumventable key words in traffic to then lock onto. The 9/11 terrorists for example, referred to their attack as a "wedding," a key word absent from the search system.

What's ironic though, and The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde points this out, is that Sweden has long been a neutral country in the world, and thus near the bottom of the list of any potential terrorist targets.

He also announces in his blog that the BitTorrent tracker site plans to do "A lot!" in response to the new enhanced FRA powers.

"This week we’re going to add SSL to The Pirate Bay. We’re also going to help out making a website about easy encryption - both for your harddrives and your net traffic," Sunde writes. "As some people know, we’re running a system for VPN-tunnels already and we’re going to lower the price for that as well and open it up for international users as well."

He also asks for ISPs to begin a global embargo on web traffic to Sweden since it will probably mean their customers privacy rights will be violated every time they connect to a Swedish ISP network.

Stay tuned.