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Sweden Admits Tapping Citizens' Phones for Decades
paulraps writes "Sweden is close to implementing new surveillance legislation that will include the monitoring of emails, telephone calls and keyword searches using advanced pattern analysis. The objective is to detect 'threats such as terrorism, IT attacks or the spread of weapons of mass destruction' but the proposals have divided the country. In a misguided attempt to put people at ease, the government admitted that Sweden has been tapping its citizens' phones for decades anyway."
The software to encrypt your information is free. If you don't use it you have to assume that people are reading your information...
Deleted
Strange country they got there. On one hand they have the Pirate Bay, wich runs with impunity, on the other this.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Cause I'd be sooooooo relaxed if my Government tries to pass a law in favour of torture, but only if they admit they've been doing it for ages.
It's like a 7-mile-wide billboard shouting "SORRY, WE HAVE NO FUCKING SHAME"...
My 0.02 cents
People should not be afraid of their Government; Governments should be afraid of their people.
Living With a Nerd
It's not like Sweden is alone. UK + NA have had http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON for quite a while.
So all the people who regularly point out how much "better" a society Sweden is than the US, either have to:
- entirely backtrack
- agree that domestic surveillance really ISN'T that big a deal
- just be hypocrites.
(grabs some popcorn)
OK, let's start discussing!
-Styopa
I live in the UK, and we are the surveillance capital of the world. The fact that phones have been tapped for years in other countries as well doesn't surprise me at all.
;-). The fall of the Soviet Union, as it once was, has always puzzled me in that I wonder whether many security services organisations could actually see what was coming.
With the internet I now have the option of securing my communications if I so wish, which isn't really a problem for surveillance at all for legitimate purposes, but this quite clearly scares the security services here and elsewhere because they want to feel like they're in control. Crucially, the security services in many countries now have to give themselves a reason for being, wasting taxpayers money and continuing the old boy's network - which is where the exagerrated levels of terrorism and foreign threats come from. We've had a ton of these arguments in the UK, and none of them stand up to scrutiny or evidence. Apparently, we're facing threats that are even graver than anything seen in World War 2, and yes there are terrorist groups out there in the world, but this is quite obviously ludicrous to any sane person.
However, I don't think that telling citizens that their phones have been unknowingly tapped for decades anyway, so there's nothing to worry about, is exactly the wisest of moves. These security services organisations are so out of their depth now it isn't even funny, especially regarding internet communications. If they wanted to keep themselves in a job then they should have worked harder to keep Communism and the Soviet Union intact
So you're one of them fellas who thinks the US is unique in having a constitution?
And when a government doesn't need a warrant to tap a phone, then you're well on the road to fascism.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, I too graduated from the "American Public Education System" but I am well aware that they are two independant countries. Are you sure you really graduated?
Posts like this annoy me. Are you saying you were actively taught they were on country? I doubt that. The only other explaination is your total lack of interest in world geography. Even one cursory look at a map of Europe and you would know.
Laws preventing illegal wiretaps in the US don't protect you from illegal wiretaps; they protect you from the admission of illegal wiretaps into evidence. That's all.
On one hand they realize that copyright infringement is not very dangerous. On the other they realize that the easiest was to deal with a national threat is to stop it before it happens.
Just so you know, just about every country in the world with the technology to do so monitors communication of its citizens. Very few are ever stupid enough to admit to it.
.. the target of terrorist attacks or under threat from WMD's?
You can be better and still suck. I hear news like this and get feelings of disgust, but I'd still rather live in Sweden than here in the USA.
And how much would Sweden have to suck before it stars being worse than the USA? The exercise goes like this: Start taking away (alleged) Swedish liberties one by one, and raise your hand when the liberty removed breaches the threshold and causes living in the USA to be preferable to Sweden.
If you run that exersie through your mind and discover that you still feel disgust and disdain for the USA no matter how many (alleged) Swedish liberties you remove, then voila: you're an anti-American. It means that you define the USA as the evil enemy. It means that all the prattle about rights and liberties and "police state" is rhetoric. In other words, you don't really give a shit about rights or liberties. It means that you care about weakening or destroying that which you have defined, regardless of any evidence, as evil to begin with: the USA.
Does this apply to you? That question is not only for the parent poster. It's for anyone who is reading this.
I remember debating with my fully-"progressive" sister who because zealotized when she moved to the UK. In one conversation, she blurted out at me, "The United States has the WORST human rights record!" In response, I asked her, "Really? Worse than North Korea?"
I got a deer-in-the-headlights look that I'll remember fondly for the rest of my life. However, her inability to answer merely showed weakness in her resolve. If she were fully committed to the anti-American cause, then she would have revved up the engine that robotically bleats out, "All of the information you've been told by the Imperial and Greedy Western Media about the glorious People's State of North Korea is LIES! They can feed all of their citizens if not for Western Greed and Imperialism! They need nuclear weapons to defend themselves against Greedy Capitalist Imperialist pigs from the West!"
That's the litany of the anti-American zealot. And that type of zealotry is just like all other types of zealotry: full devotion to the cause (whatever it may be) is of prime importance. All other concerns, including facts, logic, human life, happiness, etc, are secondary. It sounds an awful lot like Ash on the Nostromo, doesn't it? Robotic, cruel, and stupid.
But you can't call it unprincipled. And that's precisely why it's attractive.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Just because something becomes technologically possible (i.e. mass screening of emails) does not suddenly make it ok. No-one would have accepted such things in the days of snail nail. Can you imagine a democratic leader in the 80s explaining why everyone's letters needed to be steamed open and photocopied to counter the threat of the Soviet Union?
You're much more likely to be killed in a violent mugging than by terrorists. Does that mean we should allow mass email screening to identify muggers? Would they be stupid enough to discuss mugging people in emails if they knew everything was being screened? Of course not, and terrorists aren't stupid enough to discuss terrorism either.
Even if it did catch a few terrorists it's not worth giving up your freedoms for anymore that it would be worth giving them up for the possibility of catching a few more violent criminals. It doesn't take much for a democratic system to lurch towards tyranny and it is the height of stupidity to provide the facilities that make it possible.
The Taleban was created after the USSR left, and was, at best, only distantly related to the organizations which fought the Russians. It was a Pakistani import after the war ended, and the country became split between the warlords. I should also note that radical Islamic circles don't really like any nation which can be considered Western, and had the same attitude long before the (USSR-)Afghanistan war.
(sarcasm)
Throughout history, "questionable" US actions has tended to occur most when there actually is a wrong that needs righting. I'm not sure whether or not doing wrong is a valid response to doing wrong; frankly I have a hard time making that judgment call because I'm not an American.
(/sarcasm)
You're just justifying achieving goals that you ideologically like by any means possible. When your political opponents do the same thing you accuse them of being Facist. I suggest you look at the mirror.
Even though you're semi-trollish, it's interesting to note that Arabic is one of the biggest minority languages in Sweden. Many governmental services are even available in Arabic. I'd say we're pretty well set in case we'd need to find Arabic translators - there are tons of them already. Not that there are any real terrorist threats to Sweden, Arabic or otherwise.
The point is that a very significant part of all traffic from Finland to the rest of Europe as well as to North America is routed through Sweden. It may be that traffic between Sweden and, say, Russia gets routed through Finland, but the vast majority of international traffic from Finland goes to the west, whereas the same probably can't be said about the communications from Sweden to Russia or so.
I'd also be interested to hear about a single major (and at least partially Swedish) telecom company providing service to a large population in Sweden that houses servers for said services in Finland and routinely routes its traffic through the country as well. On the other hand, it's easy to name at least one such company in Finland. (In fact, it would seem that my ISP's e-mail server, which I don't use, may be located in Sweden, and at least a traceroute shows the packets going through some apparently Swedish routers.)