Bahnhof

History

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

After WikiLeaks was kicked off of Amazon Web Services in December 2010 after the Afghan War documents leak, it bought server space from Bahnhof, as its chairman Jon Karlung said in press interviews. Wikileaks later changed providers again and Bahnhof auctioned off the servers that previously housed Wikileaks.

Government response

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 anti-copyright infringement organisation.

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.

In April 2014, 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. However, 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. 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 a 24 November deadline or face a five million kronor ($680,000) fine. In response Bahnhof offered all their customers a free VPN service.

In October 2018, Elsevier secured a court order that required Swedish ISPs to block access to Sci-Hub websites. While complying with the order, Bahnhof redirected its customers who tried to access the Elsevier website to a page where Bahnhof criticizes Elsevier and its lawsuit as censorship and working against open and fair access to information and science.

References

References

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4. (2024-03-22). "Bahnhof B aktie (BAHN B)".
5. "Inside the Mountain That Used to House Wikileaks's Servers".
6. Baltzer, Harald. (30 August 2010). "Wikileaks flyttar till "kärnvapensäker" anläggning". [[International Data Group.
7. (2 December 2010). "WikiLeaks' new home is in a former bomb shelter". [[Los Angeles Times]].
8. Goldberg, Daniel. (15 April 2010). "Jon Karlung kliver av". [[International Data Group.
9. (2008). "Årsredovisning för räkenskapsåret 2007". Bahnhof AB.
10. Larsson, Linus. (9 December 2008). "Serversafari 30 meter under jorden". [[International Data Group.
11. Hammar, Ian. (10 September 2008). "Bahnhof spränger Vita bergen". Realtid.se.
12. (2013-09-03). "Bahnhof auktionerar ut Wikileaks-server. Pengarna går till Reportrar utan gränser.".
13. Olsson, Caroline. (22 March 2005). "Antipiratbyrån anklagas för piratverksamhet". [[Aftonbladet]].
14. (16 April 2009). "ISP sabotages file sharing law". [[The Local]].
15. (11 April 2014). "Sweden won't enforce data retention law against ISP that deleted metadata". PC World.
16. (29 October 2014). "Swedish data retention back in full swing minus one ISP". ZDNet.
17. (29 October 2014). "Swedish ISP Bahnhof threatened with fine for not storing customer data for law enforcement". GigaOm.
18. (16 November 2014). "Bahnhof aktiverar "plan B": erbjuder fri anonymisering". Bahnhof AB.
19. "Elsevier Forces ISP to Block Access to Sci-Hub, ISP Blocks Elsevier as Well".