A Swedish ISP that is also responsible for hosting WikiLeaks, Bahnhof, has this week triggered a fresh debate into internet privacy by announcing its intention to avoid the new European Data Retention Directive and stick all of its customers behind an effectively anonymous Virtual Private Network (VPN).

Most VPN's act as private networks that piggyback the public internet and are traditionally used to help employees stay connected with their work while away from the office. They can also have many other uses, such as allowing virtual Local Area Network (LAN) connections between users.

Crucially a good VPN will encrypt your internet activity and provide a secure way of working, which is essential for office networks. As a by-product this also means that end-users are often able to surf the internet with relative anonymity, both from other surfers and your own ISP.

The move could of course present some problems for new UK and European data retention and anti-piracy laws, the latter of which (Digital Economy Act 2010) relies upon copyright owners being able to identify "suspected" unlawful file sharing p2p activity from publicly available IP details; a feat that is already extremely unreliable.

Bahnhof believes that by cloaking its users behind a VPN, admittedly not the cheapest of solutions, their connectivity logs would end up being both significantly smaller and useless for identifying end-user activity. Naturally we wanted to know what UK ISPs thought of this.


VPN is of course a perfectly legitimate service, although some might rightly fear that following by Bahnhof's example could carry with it a number of technical and political concerns. Indeed sometimes the very fear of being identified is what deters internet abusers from doing something bad in the first place.


It is perhaps a simple truth that, due to how the open internet works, end-users already have a multitude of ways in which they can stay anonymous while online (i.e. buying your own VPN, proxy servers etc.). However the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for business ISP Timico UK, Trefor Davies, cautions that taking the VPN tunnel may not always be plain sailing.



At the extreme end of the spectrum AAISP suggests that one way to circumvent the problem set out by Timico might be to simply create a "friendly society - a private club - and only provide services to the members of that club. Then we are not a public operator at all ... That would be a fun approach."

We expect to update this article in the near future as several other UK ISPs have also been asked for their feedback. So far most of the big providers have, understandably, declined to comment.

UPDATE 29th January 2011

Comments from Entanet UK.