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Sweden Democrat members exposed in leak

Peter Vinthagen Simpson
Peter Vinthagen Simpson - [email protected]
Sweden Democrat members exposed in leak

A register of over 5,000 people who are either members or have registered their interest in the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats (SD), has been published on the internet.

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"It is an old database... which the attacker presumably got hold of in the weekend's hacker attack. We have filed a police report," SD press spokesperson Erik Almqvist told the Dagens Nyheter (DN) daily.

But according to several Swedish bloggers rumours began circulating in the weeks running up to Sunday's general election that the Sweden Democrats' member list had been obtained by hackers back in April.

Either way the list was published on Monday and is presented as a search engine enabling visitors to the site to "Get to know your local Sweden Democrats" and "Find a friend near you" with the possibility to search according to town, street address or telephone number.

According to Almqvist the information has not been actively collected by the party, but has been filed by the applicants themselves.

Almqvist argued to DN that the details have been published in order to scare current and potential members, although he sought to play down the importance of the information.

"It is not particularly sensitive information really, but we know that there is a significant level of threats directed against the members of our party," he said.

The website where the register has been published is registered to Gottfried Svartholm Varg, one of the founders of file sharing website The Pirate Bay and whistleblower website Wikileaks' web host PRQ, which is hosting the site.

While it has been confirmed that the website's IP address does in fact belong to PRQ, it remains unclear whether Svartholm Varg is in fact the person behind the site.

The whole situation is muddied still further by the fact that Mikael Viborg, who operates PRQ, has previously been employed by the Sweden Democrats as their legal counsel.

The Sweden Democrats website has been the target of a series of hacker attacks during the election campaign and was not accessible at 6am on Tuesday.

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