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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.
"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
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.
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.