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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 more to do with being able to help forieign surveilance than any domestic spying. When an ally calls for help sweden will use this to be able to bend over properly and hand over any domestic information about the targets living in sweden. Swedish domestic security has never been self-sustained but rather a help organization for ally interests like the US.
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I found this report from the EU parliament very interesting: http://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/rapport_echelon_en.pdf At page 27 there is a list of all countries intercepting private communications, and basically everyone does it? I think some former FRA employee basically admitted they have done this sort of thing for a long time already too. I'm by no means saying this is ok, but it's kinda interesting how Google reacted on this for example. They said they can't put their servers in Sweden, but US/UK etc is fine? What is the differance?
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Yes, but Telia-Sonera blocked many Open Standards sites (both pro- and neutral-) from their subscribers during the weeks leading up to the latest OOXML scandal at ISO. That was for all of Telia-Sonera, not just Sweden.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Bah, as long as strong cryptography is still authorized...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
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To say that the national radio and IDG (how many Swedes are "geeky" enough to read IDG?) has created "quite a lot of fuss" is a bit of an exageration. As the majority of the Swedish population basically rely on two sources for their news, the two national tabloids Aftonbladet and Expressen, which unfortunately are pretty much the only two media channels capable of creating a fuss among the general populace.
Then again if Aftonbladet and Expressen were to report on this chances are good that the majority would act like they always do, baah like the flock of sheep they are and quickly focus on more important issues like the Italian Goth couple that had sex in a Confession both (a article prominently featured on the frontpage of todays online edition of Expressen) or the latest Docu-soap gossip.
You comment makes it seem the social democrats did something good delaying the proposal, when in fact it was their idea in the first place. It was not delayed to help citizens, it was delayed because it got more attention than BodstrÃm wished.
I get your point about this forcing positive change, but the plan is still bullshit of the worst kind.
1 - Get enough nations to start monitoring foreign email and phone calls, claiming it's only for serious national security issues. Ban use for domestic spying or criminal investigation to appease opponents.
2 - Implement international information-sharing agreement for said national-security information. Implement it so well that the various nations are essentially accessing the same system, effectively bypassing the domestic-use ban since another country gathers the information for you.
3 - Grandstanding politicians running for re-election allow access for domestic issues like kiddie porn while screaming "Think of the children!!!"
4 - Greedy politicians bribed to allow access for DRM violations citing made up numbers about lost revenue for a dying recording industry.
5 - ???
6 - World-wide panopticon-enforced fascist dictatorship. The word "privacy" is removed from dictionaries of all languages. George Orwell's ghost stands slack-jawed from the realization that he vastly underestimated the degree of control governments are now able to enforce.
At this point in history I'd like to see an open source email client that automatically uses nsa-grade encryption. Make it dead simple & make it default. Basically this will be necessary to ensure freedom since corporate controlled government has no further use for it.
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I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Sadly we can probably expect to see more countries in Europe pass these kind of laws as they realise the risks posed by their large Muslim populations. Sweden has a tradition of naively importing huge amounts of Muslims and then paying them very generous unemployment benefits (since they are usually ill equipped to work in a modern economy), and the effects are starting to be felt. Read more here.
That said, European governments are just treating the symptoms of the problem rather than the root cause: religious extremism (and some would argue religion generally). The sooner we realise that, the better.
Some issues are worth getting thrown out of the party come next election for, this is one of them.
I don't think it's draconian to have such a law as long as there are reasonable restrictions on whose transmission even if intercepted is looked into and when they can do that.
It's already possible for the police to obtain a wiretap on anyone's subscriber line if they have a wiretap order from a competent court of law. They don't need any dedicated "wiretapping lines" for that; they can simply order the telco to establish the wiretap and send them the transmissions.
The current proposal, due to be voted on June 17, is not about creating dedicated lines to be used once in a while for transferring individual messages from senders singled out by a wiretap order.
The proposal is about creating dedicated lines to monitor all traffic passing any one of a number of access points 24/7, scanning the contents and metadata of every message for certain patterns (some sources claim there are to be around 250,000 search patterns in simultaneous use, all of them secret of course).
The FRA has claimed there will be no breach of privacy unless a message matches a pattern. This is a confusion of words at best, and a blatant lie at worst. It's like opening every letter handled by the post office, scanning it for an uncommon term like "hexamethyl fluoride", and then claiming only the privacy of messages containing the term "hexamethyl fluoride" has been breached, not the privacy of every other message.
Excuse me, but when anyone accesses my e-mail christmas greeting sent to a friend abroad to verify that I don't use the term "hexamethyl fluoride", my privacy has been breached regardless of whether I have used that term or not. And it doesn't matter a single bit to me that my message is scanned by a computer rather than a human, when I haven't the faintest idea of what that computer is looking for. Saying I'm unlikely to send a matching message doesn't resolve my complaint. I'm unlikely to be killed during a bank robbery too; that doesn't mean I will approve of making it legal for bank robbers to fire a gun at me.
When mass wiretapping is legalized and the physical infrastructure is implemented, there is nothing to stop this from being abused way beyond the original intentions, and the original intentions are unclear enough as it is. A committee of humans will oversee the world's fifth largest computer cluster scanning billions of messages every day for items matching a quarter of a million patterns, to make sure noone's privacy is being invaded without sufficient cause?
It's like watching a golf course from the club house during a thunderstorm to make sure the grass doesn't get wet.
And it's not like this 24/7 mass wiretapping programme is some unverified conspiracy theory. The technique to be used is described in the proposal itself, in the Proposed act on signals monitoring for military intelligence purposes ("Förslag till lag om signalspaning i försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet", pages 9-11), Article 3.
The good thing about this is that more people will become aware of the surveillance, whether it's legal or not, and hopefully begin defending their own privacy with the help of encryption and other means. It's a pity that it has become necessary, though.
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
Great speech, and I like this aspect of the American system.
... without actually being anywhere near the border ... without approaching anyone ... without ...
...) doing good work (and some terribly bad work, but hey, at least something moves). Then again, I truly fear for what he's going to do when a recession hits, which is happening now.
But I was talking about the european system. Every party controls "bits" of all powers, law-giving, executive AND judicial in European countries.
So everything in government here gets always expanded, and gets expanded in incoherent directions (because ministers from different parties sabotage eachother with the arm of government they have at their disposal). The army got ordered to expand quite a bit (by a "centrum-right" party), and gets a 20% budget cut (by a person from a "left-extreme-left" party) AND got ordered to modernize 60% of its equipment to improve safety (by what I think is truly a centrum party).
It got ordered AND forbidden from checking the borders. In other words, they have to stop people coming in illegaly
That's what you have in Europe. That's normal. Social security both expands massively AND contracts massively, making it utterly unreliable. There is no unity in government at all, and that's what you get.
The strange thing is, that this way of doing government actually beats what the muslims have in northern-africa. Heh, perhaps God understands, although I'd find it completely understandable if he wants nothing to do with it.
Well the above speech was true until about 1995, when all EU members surrendered their sovereignty to a single person (the president of the EU, then not yet elected). Currently there is exactly one individual in Europe that has law-giving powers, executive powers AND judicial powers in ALL member states : José Manuel Barroso, a socialist/communist.
What also amazes me, is that I actually think that, despite hating communism, and socialism (and therefore not liking obamites at all for example, nor do I have any love for their messiah), I think Barosso is (for the moment
OTOH most people I know want to move to the US or Australia/New Zeeland, so perhaps I'll simply join them.
Actually they have been doing that since the 1950's. It was revealed in the "IB" scandal. Named so after the secret buerau InformationsByrån that conducted the registrations. It was big news in the late 1970's. At the time, there were lots of Communists in Sweden and the establishment with the Social Democrats in lead was genuinly afraid that they would take over.
So Informationsbyrån was set up in secret and the information retrieved from the register was offensively used to keep the Communists in check. Unions used it to keep them out, employers used it to deny them access to important positions in the companies and so on. Some got their whole careers ruined thanks to it. IB is a good example of how when a democratic state feels threatened, it will do everything in its power to keep the status quo. Even if that means resorting to fascist methods.
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Yes, "they" have been doing it, but that wasn't FRA. And yes, IB is a good example on what not to do. Sadly, todays MPs seem incapable of learning from past mistakes.
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Certainly in the UK, it's likely to be all they've ever done since leaving university. And they very likely studied something with little practical application in the real world.
The upshot is that what they do versus what they say they'll do may or may not help them get re-elected (probably won't make much odds, voter apathy being what it is). But not towing the party line on a regular basis is a fantastically good way to find yourself thrown out of the party - which in turn is a fantastically good way to find yourself out of a job with little other prospects open to you.
Spot the obvious problem here. If the governing parties have such a strong hold on their members, then all you do when you vote is decide which (hopefully relatively benign) dictator you want in.
It logically follows that if politicians are representing their own interests to the point whereby they ignore the issues that bother the people, a party based on populist politics (ie. base your policies on whatever crazed radical steps would be needed to fix the top 5 things appearing in the more hysterical tabloids - immigration, education, that sort of stuff - consequences be damned) is in with a strong chance of winning serious numbers of votes. And so we have the BNP gaining ground.
More telling are his quotes of comments from Sweden's own law enforcement:
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Responses to the bill
How did the bureaucrats respond? In unusually plain language, actually.
The Department of Justice, among other similar comments, simply called the bill "completely alien to our form of government".
The Police Board said that the bill "indicates a frightening lack of understanding for the requirements regarding the protection of citizens' privacy that follow from our Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights".
The National Registry Authority replied that this bill "is compatible with neither the Swedish Constitution nor the European Convention on Human Rights. Such an immense expansion of wiretapping of telephony and other forms of communication
cannot be legislated under any circumstance."
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