Slashdot Mirror
Sweden On Verge of Passing Sweeping Wiretap Plan
An anonymous reader writes "No one seems to have noticed that Sweden is close to passing a far-reaching wiretapping program that would greatly expand the government's spying capabilities by permitting it to monitor all email and telephone traffic coming in and out of the country. If a bill before parliament becomes law, the country's National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) will monitor all internet traffic that passes in or out of the country. As the article notes, there's a good chance email traveling from, say, the UK to Finland would be fair game, since it's likely to traverse through Sweden before reaching its final destination. So far, there's been nary a peep from Swedish media about the plan."
This has nothing at all to do with Pirate Bay. This is NSA-style wiretapping. The evidence gathered can (supposedly) not be used in regular criminal investigations for copyright infringement.
*reads article*
Oh, just another out-of-control power grab, no doubt MAFIAA approved, with a healthy side-dose of "fuck you" to privacy.
"The evidence gathered can (supposedly) not be used in regular criminal investigations for copyright infringement."
When the US put pressure on Sweden for ThePirateBay Swedish authorities happily broke multiple laws and smiled about it. I have no doubts that any information about petty things like small time copyright infringement will be handed over.
HTTP/1.1 400
is this attitude on slashdot: shocked, shocked i tell you, that a governmental organization is not going to protect my information for me
encrypt if you don't want it snooped on. if it goes out on the wire, it is prone to being intercepted and snooped on, by the government or someone else. you realize that, right? so where is all the shock and amazement coming from that a government is doing what governments always do?
i'm not saying you don't have a right to privacy. i'm saying you are absurd if you rely on a government organization to protect your privacy for you. regardless of the law. YOU need to protect your privacy. you can't expect the government to do that competently, regardless of the law. and then, in a forum populated with a bunch of people supposedly experienced enough with the subject matter, to come from this position of complete naivete on the subject?
all i am saying is that its just kind of disingenuous for a lot of you, who to start from the default position of healthy distrust of government... to suddenly express shock and amazement at a government trying to snoop on you. this is a new concept to you? you're not jaded and cynical at this point, as you SHOULD be on the subject matter of governments and snooping if you have any awareness of the subject matter? folks: your shock and amazement is only possible if massive trust in government is your default position. you see the absurdity in that, right?
"omg! my government wants to spy on me? the idea never occured to me!"
really?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This "kind of shit" is about a surveillance society, and neither Brave New World nor Snow Crash is about that. It's true that always hearing about 1984 is getting tiresome, but unfortunately there is not a lot of other (popular) novels that put a strong emphasis on this subject. The sad truth is sci-fi is mostly interested in "cool" technology (even if this pseudo technology is absurd) rather than political ideas.
Such as?
Our trust in authoroty of this kind is strong since it have served us well in the past.You mean your trust. I, for one, do not trust them anymore than any other government. And in what instance did it serve us well in the past?
From what I've heard the snoops care more about who is talking to who than about what's actually being said. Mapping social networks and all that.
So in addition to encryption, we would all have to run anonymising proxies, such as Tor or Freenet.
In sweden there is no such legal concept as "fruit from the bad tree". That is, any evidence (gathered regardless if a search was lawfull or not, will hold in court. Single police officers may loose their jobs, but the evidence found still hold.
Not that I think these laws will be passed to please the music and movie industries, but they could certainly use any evidence passed to them from this perfect, ever watching organization.
This is SWEDEN! Since when has IT been a hotbed for terrorists or drug dealers? Middle-eastern terrorists moving to the cold sub-arctic climate of Scandinavia? Drug lords from the Columbian jungles? Not bloody likely.
It can't be militarily inspired either; Sweden is "non aligned" and has (officially) maintained a neutral stance in all wars for (nearly) the last 200 years, and they are not a party to NATO or a similar organization/treaty. Sweden has, in fact, the longest tenure of neutrality of any country in the world (yes, that includes Switzerland).
So, they're going to wage war against, and gather enormous amounts of intelligence on, its own citizens, instead? Are they going to raise the already highest tax rates in the world to pay for this needless Britain-esque surveillance?
This has nothing to do with terrorists or drugs, and everything to do with copyright "enforcement" and having more "legal" ways to gather data on Pirate Bay, their users, and other services that may set up shop there. There's no other plausible explanation.
The only parites that have had a consitently negative attitude towards this proposal has been the left party and the greens. One of the will get my vote in the next election.
The United States has already said that pretty much any private communication it can get hold of is fair game. Does anybody have the feeling that a lot of other countries are responding by taking the view that, "If you read my mail, I"m sure as hell going to read yours."
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The base is: Citizens are allowed to do anything not forbidden, for the state it is the other way around, anything they do must be allowed by law first.
My God, if only Americans understood the US Constitution as well as you do, with that statement.
This is my sig.
I personally think that this law might actually be a good thing. Due to the networked nature of the Internet, Sweden will be opening everyone's mail, not just the mail of their citizens. As a result, you might find that this prompts people to start truly using some decent encryption. If there was a sudden rise in encryption, individuals defending themselves might make this entire argument a moot point. If it takes a few dozen NASA (or Sweden's equivalent) super computers a few weeks to crack an e-mail, that fairly well rules out mass snooping.
The obvious counter is to make encryption without a back door illegal. With mobile open source projects which can set up home in any nation (or no nation) though, I think that the governments ability to enforce such absurdity would be rendered impotent.
So now the US is on the verge of "throwing the bums out" again. I guess it's not 100% hopeless for those of us who are fans of gridlock: the Democrats who are poised to take power have much internal squabbling and no coherent direction other than "away from George Bush", and can barely agree on anything themselves, so I'm not too worried that they'll pass much of their crazy platform either.
John