Bahnhof

This article is about a Swedish Internet service provider. For the meaning in the English language, see Train station.
Bahnhof AB
Aktiebolag
Genre Internet service provider
Founded 1994 (1994)
Founder Oscar Swartz
Headquarters Kista, Sweden
Key people
 Jon Karlung (CEO)
Andreas Norman (COB)
Products Internet service provider
Revenue 237,164,000 SEK (2010)[1][2]
Number of employees
 122[1]
Website www.bahnhof.se
www.bahnhof.net
Primary ASN 8473
Peering policy Selective
Traffic Levels 100 Gbps

Bahnhof is a Swedish Internet service provider (ISP) founded in 1994 by Oscar Swartz in Uppsala, Sweden, and is the country's first independent ISP. Today the company is represented in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Uppsala, Borlänge, and Lund.

WikiLeaks is currently hosted in a Bahnhof data center inside the ultra-secure bunker Pionen, which is buried inside the White Mountains in Stockholm.[3][4][5]

History

Bahnhof was founded in 1994 by Oscar Swartz. It was one of Sweden's first ISPs.[6] The company is publicly traded since December 2007 under the name BAHN-B (Aktietorget).[7] On 11 September 2008, Bahnhof opened a new computer center inside the former civil defence center Pionen in the White Mountains in Stockholm, Sweden.[8][9]

Controversies

On 10 March 2005, the Swedish police confiscated four servers placed in the Bahnhof premises, hoping to find copyrighted material. Although these servers were located near Bahnhof's server park (in a network lab area) the company claimed they were not their property since they had been privately purchased by staff. They further presented evidence showing the material on these servers had been planted there by someone hired by Svenska Antipiratbyrån, a Swedish organisation fighting against copyright infringement.[10]

In 2009, Bahnhof generated controversy by failing to store the IP addresses of customers, in order to defeat the Swedish government's new laws on illegal file-sharing, transposing the EU IPRED regulations, which enabled ISPs to retain data longer than the data protection regulations would allow, in order for them to be available on police request."ISP sabotages file sharing law". The Local. 16 April 2009. Retrieved 15 October 2015. 

After the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks was kicked off of Amazon Web Services in December 2010, it bought server space from Bahnhof, as its chairman Jon Karlung revealed in press interviews after in the light of the new controversy created by the leaks about the War in Afghanistan (2001–14), even showing journalists the two servers on which the data was held. The chairman said that WikiLeaks is treated like any other of Bahnhof's clients.

In April 2014, however, the CJEU struck down the Data Retention Directive. PTS, Sweden's telecommunications regulator, told Swedish ISPs and telcos that they would no longer have to retain call records and internet metadata.[11] But after two government investigations found that Sweden's data retention law did not break its obligations to the European Convention on Human Rights, the PTS reversed course.[12] Most of Sweden's major telecommunications companies complied immediately, though Tele2 lodged an unsuccessful appeal. Bahnhof was the one holdout and it was given an order to comply by November 24 deadline or face a five million kronor ($680,000) fine.[13] In response Bahnhof offered all their customers a free VPN-service, thus making it impossible for Bahnhof to hand over customer data to law enforcement.[14]

References

  1. 1 2 "Bahnhof AB". CorporateInformation. Retrieved 18 March 2011.
  2. ↑ "Bokslutskommuniké: 2010" [End of year report, 2010] (PDF) (in Swedish). Bahnhof AB. 2010. Retrieved 18 March 2011.
  3. ↑ Baltzer, Harald (30 August 2010). "Wikileaks flyttar till "kärnvapensäker" anläggning" [WikiLeaks moves to "nuclear weapons secure" facility] (in Swedish). IDG Sweden. Retrieved 18 March 2011.
  4. ↑ "WikiLeaks' new home is in a former bomb shelter". Los Angeles Times. 2 December 2010. Retrieved 18 March 2011.
  5. ↑ "About us". Hostinator. Archived from the original on 13 May 2012.
  6. ↑ Goldberg, Daniel (15 April 2010). "Jon Karlung kliver av" [Jon Karlung steps down] (in Swedish). IDG Sweden. Retrieved 18 March 2011.
  7. ↑ "Årsredovisning för räkenskapsåret 2007" [Annual Report for fiscal year 2007] (PDF) (in Swedish). Bahnhof AB. 2008. p. 2. Retrieved 18 March 2011.
  8. ↑ Larsson, Linus (9 December 2008). "Serversafari 30 meter under jorden" [Serversafari 30 meters under the earth] (in Swedish). IDG Sweden. Retrieved 18 March 2011.
  9. ↑ Hammar, Ian (10 September 2008). "Bahnhof spränger Vita bergen" [Bahnhof blasts the White Mountains]. Realtid.se (in Swedish). Retrieved 18 March 2011.
  10. ↑ Olsson, Caroline (22 March 2005). "Antipiratbyrån anklagas för piratverksamhet" [Antipiratbyrån accused of piracy]. Aftonbladet (in Swedish). Retrieved 18 March 2011.
  11. ↑ Essers, Loek (11 April 2014). "Sweden won't enforce data retention law against ISP that deleted metadata". PCWorld.
  12. ↑ Tung, Liam (29 October 2014). "Swedish data retention back in full swing minus one ISP". ZDNet.
  13. ↑ Meyer, David (29 October 2014). "Swedish ISP Bahnhof threatened with fine for not storing customer data for law enforcement". GigaOm.
  14. ↑ "Bahnhof aktiverar ”plan B”: erbjuder fri anonymisering" (in Swedish). Bahnhof AB. 16 November 2014. Retrieved 15 October 2015.

External links

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