Dec 3, 2010

US Pirate Party Update

Earlier this week, TPID reported that there had been one confirmed and one unconfirmed resignation among the officers of the US Pirate Party in recent days.  On Monday, Legal Officer Andrew Norton published a letter at Politics & 2P explaining his decision to "quit the USPP."  TPID has confirmed that a second officer also resigned, but that this resignation is unrelated to the matters of concern to Norton, and not due to political or creative differences with the USPP.  TPID is not aware of any official statements from the USPP on these matters, as the party's website has been down all week, though there is some discussion of the matter and the appropriate response on the Pirate Party's Facebook page.

The above-linked post from TPID raised the question of whether the Pirate Party's website might have been the target of a DDoS attack, perhaps due to the party's official opposition to Anonymous's Operation:Payback, which was strongly supported by Norton.  One might also reasonably have wondered whether the site was also targeted in the attacks that brought down the Wikileaks website this week.  (Wikileaks is now reportedly being hosted by the Pirate Party of Switzerland.)  In a comment to that post, however, USPP Records Officer Brad Hall categorically denies that the USPP website was disabled by Anonymous, and writes, "we are told by our web host that the reason was due to them finding some type of malware on the site. We are on top of the situation and the site should be back online before the end of the week."

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