Slashdot Mirror
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."
For example 90% of internet traffic from Finland to international destinations goes through Sweden. Which means that Swedes may be able to spy on Finnish traffic as well.
This causes problems because in Finland your mailbox (and of course e-mail traveling to it) is protected by legislation to be your private space. For example your employer has no right to go and look at its contents without your permission even if they own the equipment and the disk space and it contains valuable company information. Of course there are provisions for accessing your e-mail if you happen to be run over by a truck, but in that case the employer has to document when the mailbox was opened, who were present, what was read/removed etc. This applies to e-mail logs to some extent as well.
Sooooo, if you are a company offering e-mail to your employees in Finland but hosting the e-mail servers in Sweden, this Swedish initiative may mean that you are in violation of Finnish laws because outsiders can get access to the mail traffic. The Finnish authorities have taken the view that if this becomes reality, the e-mail servers for Finns need to be moved to Finland.
Long live Nordic co-operation!
I've had one of the more famous professors in data mining directly tell us how stupid it is to try and find "terrorism" in these sorts of data sets. There are too few training data points (actual terrorists) and too much data with a lot of variability. In essence false positives alone would make it all worthless. Now of course some people in the field disagree but those are also usually the ones who stand to make a pretty penny if governments do go this route.
So soon we may no longer have many freedoms but at least I'll have guaranteed employment.