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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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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.
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.
Welcome to the new milennium!
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.