Sweden may block Pirate Bay over child porn

Swedish police say they may put the world's largest torrent tracker, The Pirate Bay, on its porn filter blacklist after complaints about child porn being traded on the site.

If Pirate Bay is placed on the list, anyone trying to access the site from Sweden through ISP's such as Telia, Tele2 and Bredbandsbolaget will be redirected to a police site.

Stefan Kronkvist, head of the National Criminal Investigation Department's IT department, says the site will be placed on the National Police Board's blacklist if the material is still there this week.

The Pirate Bay condemned the police threat as "an ignorant abuse".

"The whole idea of police threatening to censor us seems to be moral panic from high up within the ranks of Swedish politics," Brokep from The Pirate Bay writes on his blog. "To make things perfectly clear - we don’t host any content. And I have never seen child porn on The Bay. Our moderators work on all the reports we receive from the public and they contact ECPAT or other organizations if they found suspicious stuff."

Founder Fredrik Neij tols Swedish site The Local that he hasn't been contacted by the police at all. "The first thing they should have done was to tell us that there was child pornography, so that we could check it out and if necessary remove the links to the files."

Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party says the decision undermines the legitimacy of the child porn filter, which is not intended for subjective use by government officials to close down undesirable sites.®