Sweden's Watergate

An anonymous reader writes, "Sweden's ruling Social Democratic Party's internal network has been illegally accessed several hundred times over a period of several months. Party treasurer Tommy Ohlstroem describes the incident as "wide-scale and systematic." Computer security company Sentor's investigation has revealed intrusions originating from computers belonging to Sweden's Liberal Party, and with the upcoming election in only two weeks many commentators are already describing this as Sweden's Watergate (Swedish only). An employee of the Young Liberals has admitted to unauthorized access, but a series of mysterious coincidences in the form of exceptionally well timed public announcements by the Liberal Party suggests the involvement of more than one person."

Comments

Many misleading statements

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

1, 84 times not hundred of times.

2. If was done by ONE member of the LUF - not the Liberal Party - LUF is the youth organisations associated with the Liberal Party.

3. He did it by trying to login using the same password as the username and other simple methods - and cracked 3 accounts. Socialist party had not a very secure system.

4. The journalist claims ha was approached by a member of the liberal party who showed him how to accces the webbsite on a cyber cafe. That member claimed that many within the Liberal party know about it. Even though as far is known only 1(one) person did know about it.

5. The journalist was/is a active member of the Socialist party youth section.

6. The socialist party has know about this break-in for some time.

7. The disclosure was made the same night as the major candidate to take over as prime minister was on TV being questioned - the leader of the Moderate party. (swedish right wing - but more like US democrats)

9. The Socialistic party has before had an politician send emails pretending to be the Moderate party leader to journalists - trying to make it sound like the party leader was an idiot - and the socialist party member got fired in a scandal.

There is an election this month in Sweden. The alleged crime was committed last year and until mars this year but not publicly known until now just before the election.

You take your pick of who has done most to use this to win the election.

Re:Explanation of 'swedish liberal'

[grimJester]

To elaborate, in Sweden both 'conservative' and 'liberal' are considered right wing, with liberal = economy liberal = market forces know best and conservative = social conservative = think of the children.

Right = anti-immigration, being tough on crime, corporate interests etc. Racism to keep the rabble happy while the rich suck them dry.

Well, that is not exactly true...

[Mindjiver]

The largest party in sweden would be the social democrats, the second largest party are Moderaterna, the liberal party would be the third largest. And your placement of the parties on an american left-right-scale is not entirely true either.

- Social Democrates, pragmatic power party with an emphasis on a large welfare state and a regulated labour market.
- Moderates, previously somewhat conservative that now have triangulated the social democrates more or less totally.
- Peoples Party - Liberals, Social-liberal party that now could be placed to the right of the moderates.

Since there are seven major parties in sweden instead of two large coalitions like in the United States I find it hard to compare them to either the democrats or the republicans. For example it is hard to find any great amount protectionism in any of the parties platforms, but all favour a welfare state with socialized medicine for example. So you are over-simplifying things a bit too much! :)

Re:Well, that is not exactly true...

[the-intersocialist]

The reason why you cannot compare the parties in Sweden with the Democrats and the Republicans is that the social democrats is a party of the workers movement (their name is actually "the workers party social democrats"). The basis of the social democratic party is in the peoples movements (tennants associations, tradeunions, cooperative enterprises, temperance movement, student unions, the peoples education movement, etc.), which consists of millions of people and are controlled by the social democrats (the social democrats themselves has 150 000 members, which is much compared to the other parties but small compared to what they used to be). For this reason, the division in Sweden is not between the liberal and the conservative but between the bourgeois and the workers parties. Bourgeios (Swedish "borgerlig") is a strange word in English, but in Swedish it what the right-wing parties call themselves. In the US there are only bourgeios parties, with very limited base in mass movements and very limited activities outside of the parliamentary context.

Re:Explanation of 'swedish liberal'

[Per Wigren]

Right = anti-immigration, being tough on crime, corporate interests etc. Racism to keep the rabble happy while the rich suck them dry.

I'm Swedish and I'm pretty leftist, but that is plain FUD.

Anti-immigration and racism:
It holds true to the extreme right-wing parties that are not in the Swedish Riksdag, such as Nationaldemokraterna (openly racist, pseudo-nazi party), Sverigedemokraterna (ultra-nationalists) and such, but not the etablished right-wing parties. If you count HBQT-intolerance (homo/bi/queer/trans) and general bigotism you can put Kristdemokraterna (The Christian Democrats, ultra-conservative) in this group though...

Corporate interests:
That holds true to both sides. The exceptions are Miljöpartiet (The Greens, centre liberals currently allied with the left-wing parties) and Vänsterpartiet (former communist party). The Social Democrats are very much on the right (non-left) side of the scale in regard to corporate interests.

Being touch on crime:
All parties want to be tough on crime, they only differ on what type of crimes to prioritize. The Social Democrats (left, currently the biggest party in Sweden) have (obviously) made filesharing one of their top priorities. As they have shown the last years they also want to abandon our famous open and liberal society by removing our constitutional right to anonymous communication and privacy at home by creating insane surveillance laws allowing the police to bug anyone they like, even if they aren't suspected of a crime. What's even worse is that the right block's minister of justice (if they win the election) is just as bad or worse in this regard... Both sides are sucking Bush's and Blair's asses in the war-against-terrorism-nonsence.

That's why I voted for Piratpartiet - The Pirate Party, the only party that REALLY care about your freedom of speech, freedom of expression, your right to privacy and will fight against patents and reform the copyright law to make it reasonable for both customers and authors. (no, lifetime + 70 years isn't reasonable. ~20 years after release is reasonable.)

Re:A bit OT, but since we're on the Swedish electi

[gkhan1]

While I haven't seen any recent polls on them specifically, they will almost certainly have no impact whatsoever. To get a seat in parliament, you need atleast 4% of the popular vote (this is to weed out small, very fringe parties, such as nazis and pirates ;) and in the last election, around 5.3 million people voted. 4% of 5.3 million is 212000 votes. They have no chance in hell of getting that many.

Much more interesting are two other tiny parties, FI (feministic initiative) and a party that's called the June-list. The first one was formed as a response to a percieved lack of feministic issues being discussed in the national theatre (I'm a rabid feminist, it's an extremely important issue for me, but unfortunatly, the leaders if FI are, well, insane). The second one, Juni-listan (the June-list), was a party that was formed at the last swedish referendum (whether we should join the European Monatery Union and start using the Euro) as a rabid anti-EU party. Both are now trying to get into the parliament. It will be interesting to see what happens with them, but the Pirate Party has unfortunatly no chance of getting any seats. I mean, even I, a slashdotter who takes the copyright issue seriously, won't vote for them. I'm sorry, but there is too much at stake in this election.