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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."
saying 'Liberal' in Sweden is not the same as saying 'liberal' in the USA. Of the two major Swedish political parties, the liberals are the more right leaning. In the US however, both swedish parties however would be generally considered to be left of the Democrats.
(Generally, I don't find terms like 'left' or 'right' helpful for a serious political discussion, but it will do for slashdot)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Ikea is the source of mistrust of sweden for me.
Warhammer forums
... over here, not members of opposing parties are opening the respective other boxes, but email is illegaly read by members of the own conservative party CDU without consent... See http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/77680 for further information (or Googlelated)
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
Just before 2006's Hungarian Parliamentary Election, the Hungarian Socialist Party accused the Alliance of Young Democrats with accessing the private server of theirs. The "proof" was a screenshot from a Win2003 server log showing the host belonging to the party. The accused party countered by showing proof that their internal site was systematically accessed by the other party, also showing logs.
The internal server of the Socialist Party turned out to be a password protected http server containing some upcoming promotional campaign pictures, with some trivial password like hsp:redflower. The pass somehow leaked and thousands of other people viewed it, myself included, before it became a "scandal" and "proof of hacking" and "ServerGate".
I hope the swedish parties are more grown up than to play stupid games like that and I hope the swedish public is more educated than the hungarian, so that they can tell if nothing extraordinarily happened, just some PR hype..
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
"Mental think"? It sounds like these blondes are a tad smarter than you. Racist fucktard.
If you think the blonde race has it tough, try being a bald-American.
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.
Just saying it like it are.
yeah except that in the case "liberals" are the most right-wing, they'd be equivalent to US' GOP, except that Sweden's politics (and all of Europe's politics in fact) have a gravity center much farther "left" than the US'.
Oh wait, maybe that was your point?
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Hooray!
Monstar L
I saw this thread's title "Sweden's Watergate" right after reading "Debian Kicks Jörg Schilling"; so I naturally assumed it was a dupe.
#DeleteChrome
[blockquote]Ikea is the source of mistrust of sweden for me.[/blockquote] And vikings! They don't get nearly as much attention as pirates and ninjas, but they are pretty sneeky!
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Of course not. But the order of the offense is even below viewing a porn site with borrowed passwords, on the level of viewing a link to a misconfigured site showing not-to-be-public-but-still-out-there material.
It is not a hack attack and most certainly not a -gate scandal.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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!
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
it was probably a møøse!
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
> yeah except that in the case "liberals" are the most right-wing, they'd be equivalent to US'
;-)
> GOP, except that Sweden's politics (and all of Europe's politics in fact) have a gravity
> center much farther "left" than the US'.
In USA, anything to the left of Atila the Hun is a raving liberal
Hee bor shteer, bom bor shteer doo,
A dish-pi-doo.
Bor bor shteer, lum bor shteer doo,
Bork! Bork! Bork!
Shteer!
Sheeba shleeba goo, dish mooga hacken PC. Ung gish libo hacken PC, mish gee looder bouffer ooverfloo. Gee pish der bouffer ooverfloo mish der leety scripty in der shellcode mik joo inken Intel assoumbler. Fish, ung gish leeber scannen porten mooga funky nmap, bish der open port shif lish der foorwoll. Dish skel loder mish der leety scripty, spur gifor der bouffer ooverfloo, ung desh ooger morgen der stackenschmoosher! Ung gesh, mooga dish spur lorger hacken PC!
February 17 Minister for Schools and Adult Education Ibrahim Baylan released the report "Ten myths about the Swedish school". The same day Jan Björklund, the Swedish Liberal Party's education spokeman counterattacked, with the report "Ten truths about the school".
According to today's industry willed Baylan placed forward a report about the school during the weekend as gone. Last Saturday the done party leader Lars Leijonborg and Minister for Schools and Adult Education challenging clean Jan Björklund an initiative about order in the school.
Ministers Jens Orback and Mona Sahlin presented last Friday a report "Sweden will at last a stem time country on the integration area". The Swedish Liberal Party came with a reply that same day, in the form of a statement of integration spokeman Mauricio Rojas and two reports writen by the Member of Parliament.
But both party press spokeman Johan Jakobsson and party leader Lars Leijonborg rejects all rumours about the use of internal information in order to plan initiatives in the campaign.
- I have looked the through initiatives and can not find any connections, the is clean chances, says Lars Laijonborg.
He may medhåll of your partisekreterare
- we do test initiatives each day so the is a clean coincidence, orders Johan Jakobsson SvD.se.
I think the issue here is not the dirty tricks per se, but trying to cover those up. Nixon and Clinton suffered the consequences of their lies, while Reagan was forgiven since he admitted the deed and said he was sorry before the coverup grew big enough to bite him in the arse.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
If 30% care or change in any electorate is a huge deal! Since Sweden is proportional voting, and if you look at the wikipedia numbers it appears they have 144 seats of 349. They only need another 31 seats to have the majority, and 31 seats is only 9% of the electorate, it appears that it is possible that a 30% swing has the potential to pick up enough seats to get a majority.
The enemies list and the dirty tricks were an offense against the spirit of democracy, but as you say that wasn't Watergate.
The break in at the Watergate was not most of the Watergate story, although it was the germ from which the scandal of Watergate grew. It was, as you say, just dirty tricks.
What Watergate was about was about the Nixon administration trying to cover up the Watergate break in, and in the course of doing so using the powers of the Presidency to undermine the law. Every American has been taught: the powers of the President are granted to uphold the law and defend the nation. It is obvious to all but the most partisan Americans that when a President uses his powers to undermine the law, it is an abomination that strikes at the foundation of our nation's identity.
The single act that fatally poisoned the Nixon presidency was when he fired Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor, for getting too close to the truth. When he was fired, he said this: "Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people." It was a ringing endorsement of the American people, and a throwing down of the guantlet in the court of public opinion. My mother-in-law was a Harvard Law School secretary for many years, and Archibald Cox was one of "her" professors. During the Iran Contra scandal, he remarked to her that it was unlikely that much would come of it, because when a President decides to break the law, there is really no practical way to stop him, unless the American people rise up against him. In Watergate, American public opinion rose up agains the President. In Iran Contra, it may have disagreed with him, but it did not rise up as a whole.
Over the many years I've been following politics, one thing has become very clear: democracy doesn't ensure that politicians pursue wise or virtuous policies. Vietnam, the Watergate coverup, Iran-Contra, the second Iraw War; no practical democratic system can prevent such misadventures from starting.
The great virtue of democracy lies not in preventing folly, but in the inevitability of people doing collectively what individuals who have identified themselves with a disasterous plan seldom can: they change their mind.
I like to remember this when prospects for my country look bleak, so that I can never be totally discouraged. Over time, there are truths that are too large and connected to too many lives to be hidden. Inevitably, the scales fall from the people's eyes, and when that day comes it is a day of reckoning for politicians who pursue the Big Lie. It does not prevent untold harm from befalling; indeed it is only great harm that brings this about. But as long as there is any memory of democracy, any shred of the democratic spirit left in us, we will exercise the greatest democratic right of all: throwing the bums out.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
when republicans broke in to democratic computers to read strategy documents.
'broke in' == 'accessed unsecured server'
Also note the files downloaded were embarrassing to the democrates, revealing the depths of their cynicism to the press. Calling it hacking was a distraction which the partisanly liberal elements of the American press were happy to latch onto (and hence ignore the content the democrates had 'chosen to share').
The whole story makes an excellent litmus test for your media sources. Biased left or right. I've yet to see balanced reporting on that one.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
...how is the Pirate Party (www.piratpartiet.se) coming out in the polls recently? Any swedes who could tell us?
Cause we all know OpenBSD will stop people from using their username as a password on a middleware system.
Oh, wait, just another case of keyboard before brain.
Think about it, just one bored and lonely office worker of indiscriminate sex to charm, no messy hacking about that can leave indelible digital traces :D
Warning to the feeble-minded : "Do not attempt this on your bored and lonely office worker of indiscriminate sex"
Thank you for your kind attention, please complete the following form to confirm your intelligence is above average.
http://www.click.here.to.assert/your.intelligence
# ~: no sigs today
Yet another reason to vote for Piratpartiet!
hands up!
And to be quite frank. I don't consider "Expressen" a newspaper. They represent the "Fox News" of Swedish papers, although without the political bias. (They are not so much biased as fucking stupid.)
They are more concerned about which wannabe star got drunk in a pub for other sad wannabes than actual news. It's sad really, it used to be a world-class photojournalism paper.
CBS News report on Watergate from 1972-06-19.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=I28mQEVJQso
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Depends on which side I turn to the USA with.
Oh BTW (if anyone still reads) who are liberal-conservatives then?
-------Attila the Late
Sig. under reconstruction.
What's scary isn't that someone now identified managed to enter their internal network containing very sensitive information from the Swedish security police about politican protection, but that said network had a user with maximum privilegies with his password the same as his username... :-p And it was not changed at a minimum for a half year period. The socialist party shouldn't just worry about this now -- at least the liberal youth party has come forward with this and the person is now identified -- but they should rather be worried if anyone with more malicious purposes than peeking into their scheduled political events have got hold of this information with that horrible security. Better start checking the audit logs of the past few years, guys. :-p
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
why oh why does that watergrate seem soo incredibly boring when compared to a real live break in...
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
...but there wasn't much about it on the news (As usual.)
1, 84 times not hundred of times.
Wrong. Actually, most news sources says it was 78 times during january, february and march. They also say there were more logins than those 78. Anyway, how would you know the exact amount?
2. If was done by ONE member of the LUF - not the Liberal Party - LUF is the youth organisations associated with the Liberal Party.
Wrong. As of now, two people in LUF has already confessed involvement, and the newspaper Dagens Industri says they'll name another person involved tomorrow, and that she's in the innermost circle of the Liberal Party. And there's more! Several members of the liberal party actually tried to log on with their own names(!)
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.
Wrong. No claim has been made to an attack like the one describe.
Instead, the local social-democratic department in question uses a wireless network, and a representative said someone probably sniffed it. The Liberal Party claims a member of the social-democratic youth organization gave them the passwords.
Either way, it's true that using passwords like that is insecure. But it's even more true that taking advantage of it like these liberals did is unethical. I'd prefer someone technically-impaired before someone ethically-impaired any day.
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.
Wrong. See 2. And it isn't a website, it's a FirstClass system.
5. The journalist was/is a active member of the Socialist party youth section.
I admit this is worth mentioning if it is true. I've followed this thing quite closely though and you're the first to claim it. This wouldn't surprise me, but considering the rest of your post consisting mostly of unique claims and biased nonsense, I wouldn't trust you for anything.
6. The socialist party has know about this break-in for some time.
Partly true. They say they've suspected it for some time. They hired an investigator (Sentor) wednesday last week, the investigation was finished sunday afternoon, and they held the press conference a few hours later, at midnight.
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)
True, but pointless. The election is the 17th, not the 7th. If they wanted it to have the biggest possible impact, one would think they'd keep it a secret for more than just a few hours. That way they could've dropped the bomb much closer to the election. Now, it might just as well hurt the social-democratic party, because of exactly the point you're trying to make -- people will think that they're just taking advantage of this to win the election. This is probably why they chose not to "come to any political conclusions from this, but wait for the police investigation to finish". And at least this first day, the only parties to speak out on the matter has been the Liberals and the Conservatives ("Moderates"). The social democrats seem wise enough to shut up and let people think for themselves, for once.
(btw, what happened to 8? you got that one before me?)
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.
-1 Off-topic. So what? If you're going to try to change the outcome of the Swedish election
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...a Swedish Liberal is more like a Canadian Liberal, which is to say that a Liberal doesn't really have any concrete principles except to say and do whatever might help them achieve and maintain power ;-)
As others have observerd here, politics outside the US is far more complicated than "left and right" (hell, even US politics has more dimension than that, though the fact that only two parties have power simplifies things). Even the Canadian landscape is far different politically and in some ways mirrors the Swedish situation. For those non-Canadian readers:
Canada's federal parliament has 4 official parties, which dont exactly fall evenly on a political left-right spectrum...cynically, they are:
1. The Conservative party currently leads a minority government (largest portion of the commons but still less than 50%). It is also the youngest federal party in Canada (it has only ran in two elections--2004 and 2006). It came into being largely because of a coalition of some disaffected MPs from two now-defunct right-of-centre parties (The Alliance and Progressive-Conservatives/PCs). This un-official coalition ended when the Alliance chose a new leader (the current Prime Minister), and a formal merger was achieved not long after the PCs chose their new leader (now deputy leader of the Conservatives and current Foreign Affairs minister). Because of this heritage, the Conservative party is a fairly mixed-bag of vaguely right-wing principles. The Alliance generally represented the "far right" (equivalent to moderate US Republicans) though in acutality it was an almost evenly-split coalition of populitsts, social conservatives and libertarians. The Progressive-Conservatives (which sounds like an oxymoron to many people) were nominally right-of-centre in that they were socially "progressive" (protect socialised medicine, support gay marriage, strong central government) but economically conservative (scrap costly gun control, support free trade, outlaw deficits...).
Despite PM Harper being described by his critics on the left as "shrub" or "George's puppet" or other such nasty ways, suggesting that he and his party are nothing more than far-right republicans, Harper himself is acually from the libertarian faction of this large "right wing" coalition. Though he is a regular church-goer he is loathe to legislate morality and evasive on subject such as gay marriage (he'd generally prefer to defer such moral decisions to free votes in Parliament). This lets him get out of having to put the coalition in jeopardy by angering the social conservative support base and appeals to the populist demand for more direct democracy.
Disappointingly to most Conservative supporters the party is viewed as the "least bad" of all the parties. Populists want more action on democratic reform and more openness in goverment than we've been getting recently. Social conservatives would like more vocal defence of thier values by their learder and MPs (which would probably scare off most Conservative support realistically). Libertarians are frustrated at pledging support for large government programmes like mandatory universal healthcare. The one thing that truly unites this party is economic conservatism, and it support is not realy solid--it retains its support basically because it has acutally kept most of its election promises. A study was recently done and quite literally it is the first government that has kept more than half its election promises since, like world war II.
2. The Liberal Party is the official opposition though it has held power for most of Canada's history as a nation. It, well, stands for nothing in particular. Ironically the Liberal's are probably best described as "classiclally conservative" as they support (or at least pay lip service to) "traditional Canadian values". These values are not "bic C" Conservative (what we'd call right wing), but it does fall under the definition of a "classic conservative" (which is to day, they advocate the preservation of
From Swedish media it is evident that the Social democrats server was
//Pingo
protected by username/password. In this case one of the persons with
access to sensitive information had choosen password exactly equal to
his username.
In the corporate world this kind of passwords is a big no no and would
be considerd reckless. The Swedish Social Democrats is now making a big
deal out of an allmost criminal negligance by their own people.
Could this be due to their unfavourable opinion polls close to the
election on the 17th this month?
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
Comparing a couple of researchers buying copies of a confidential credit report on a MD Lt Governor to senate staff hacking the Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats mail server for over a year, spying on the strategy to oppose Bush's judge nominee (including the Supreme Court), is like comparing lying about a blowjob to lying us into Iraq. If you insist, we should agree to impeach Bush.
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"Moral relativism"? Even Jesus thought murder was worse than lying, and anyone who doesn't worship Bush would agree that lying us into war is worse than lying about a blowjob.
There were no WMD. And those inspectors you have the gall to mention also said there were no WMD.
But "morality" is your virgin priest's business. The legal penalty for lying about a blowjob is... acquittal in the Senate. The legal penalty for lying us into invading Iraq is... nothing, when Republicans run Congress.
You people are disgusting, and you're all going to hell. And I don't mean just the "war is hell" hell, either.
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If I wanted to play your game, I'd cut through your lies by saying that neither Clinton nor Kerry invaded Iraq. And even though I haven't said anything about Kerry, he was one of the people who Bush lied in the most seriously wrong way. Bush lied to Congress, which is an impeachable offense. And invaded Iraq on those lies. Even a Republican Senate didn't find Clinton guilty of lying about a blowjob.
And don't give me any of that crap about "Bush had bad intelligence" (unless you mean "Bush is stupid"). No one believes that BS. Everyone knows that Bush and Cheney made up the intelligence to get the Iraq War they always wanted. And now we're stuck with it. And we're stuck with losers like you calling people "Liberal" as if it were a bad word, or as if it were true, or even meant anything. Republican loser people like you who respond to talk about Bush's catastrophes with "But Clinton...". You are the sissiest political monsters ever, and only you diehard Bush worshippers even repeat that BS anymore. Save it for your concession speeches.
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I didn't say "but they didn't invade Iraq based on THEIR lies", I said they didn't invade Iraq. And their words said they were busy stopping Saddam from getting WMD, to which effect Clinton ran an air war against Saddam through the decade which stopped him without invading.
My charge was that Bush lied us into invading Iraq. Spin that however you want, your boy lied us into Iraq.
Where's the WMD?
And as long as you're going to fly all over the map with your strawmen and lies, WHERE'S OSAMA?
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Yap yap yap.
I'm secular all right.
And YOU ARE GOING STRAIGHT TO HELL. You can argue about it with Saddam forever.
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Why, Anonymous fascist Coward, because you fascist Republicans can't pretend you're anything but failures for much longer?
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Moderation -1
100% Offtopic
TrollMods think repeating Watergate in DC is offtopic to repeating it in Sweden.
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