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."
Finnish telco Sonera, which is nowadays part of Swedish TeliaSonera moved recently their email servers back to Finland from Sweden because of this.
Apparently their customers were concerned enough.
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.
There has actually been quite a lot of fuss around this law. For example, a seldomly used law paragraph enabled the social democratic minority to delay this proposal for a year, something which gained quite some attention when it happened. If that had not been done, the law would have passed a year ago. An update to what was happening during this period is available at http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.156736 (swedish only). IDG is the largest swedish news agency for technology-related news. At the national swedish radio homepage http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/ekot/artikel.asp?Artikel=1242136 you can read about finlands protests against the law. They also published news about the growing criticism of the law at http://www.sr.se/Ekot/artikel.asp?artikel=1240436 (both links in swedish).
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.
HTTP/1.1 400
At least their declaring it in law, with a few limitations etc. They could just do as our government has done and start screening emails using a secretive organization with few safeguards without even officially telling people.
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?
Free unix shells: Blinkenshell.org
*reads article*
Oh, just another out-of-control power grab, no doubt MAFIAA approved, with a healthy side-dose of "fuck you" to privacy.
That's perhaps one of the most Pollyanna-ish comment's I've read on Slashdot in a long time.
"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
First: As one living in Sweden I don't recognize this description. For one, there is quite a stir in IT related, and mainstream media about this. And this have been going on for several years. The current government suggested this while in opposition a couple of years ago, and it was one of the first new legislations that they announced when they got into power 2006. It's been under debateand scrutiny in media and several governmental instances since then.
Secondly: FRA is _not_ a military organization. It's a civil autority that can be used for several other governmental organizations such as the police, secret police, military or even state owned corporations. But the name is confusing, I grant you that.
One interessting thing is that FRA operates the fifth fastest computer on the Top500 list. Most people believe that is was purchased to meet the need of this new surveillance demand.
It's hardly unknown to the public, even if most are not interessted in such matters. Swedes are pretty used to governmental control and oversight, and we acually enjoy the benefits of it. Our trust in authoroty of this kind is strong since it have served us well in the past.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Doesn't screaming "1984" at the top of your lungs every single time technology and government occur in the same context ever get tiring? At least read some other dystopian books and put some variety in the alarmism!
C'mon, let's give some airtime to Hiro Protagonist and Bernard Marx at least. That's more where this kind of shit is headed to...
Today FRA has the lawful right and ability to monitor all communication that is broadcast using radio/wave-transmission, since much(most?) traffic at some point goes via satellite and/or radio link they already listen in.
The new bill gives them the right to tap into the cables directly, but it also leaves a possibility for them to share their information with other government bodies, and that is the real kicker. So if you write in an e-mail that you drove home drunk yesterday, that could be used against you in a court of law (in Sweden there are no rules against what can be used as evidence).
FRA claims that this will not be the case, but the new bill would make it lawful to do so.
So in conclusion: Everyone in the world is already being wiretapped by the Swedish government, but this would make it a bit easier for them, and also give them the right to share the information with other Swedish government bodies.
From what I gather there is a similar threat in Finland as well: the representatives of major and minor multinationals have been meeting with Finish legislators lately to work out laws granting private companies the authority to monitor *all* communications in any form. AFAIK more of their subversion will occur during coming weeks or months.
Welcome to your summer holidays. If this is surfacing now, what real nastiness is lurking for the deepest summer?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
OK, so the solution is to place a mail server at TeliaSoneras net, create a VPN-tunnel (or SSH-tunnel) to it and send the mail that way instead? Or the boring fix: frankly change from my own domain to GMail..
There are 2 types of people in the world - those who understand decimal and those who don't.
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
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.
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.
This one is almost certain to pass, a majority of parliament have already professed their coming yes-votes.
Party whips takes care of those who are critical to the law: It was up for a vote last year, but got put on a year-long hold for further debate (which, naturally, never took place). One member of parliament (Fredrick Federley) who was elected on a privacy platform, among other issues, abstained from voting and took so much heat from his party that he'll be voting yes this time around. At least according to his blog.
L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.
Unless several MPs suddenly grow a spine, this one will pass in less than two weeks.
Money for nothing, pix for free
I know it's a pipe dream, but if enough of us would encrypt everything we can that crosses the internet we could vote with our resource consumption and force the bastards to be selective about what they decrypt. Our individual privacy would thus be somewhat assured by the signal to noise ratio.
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
You mean Cogent prevented Telia-Sonera customers from accessing said documents?
You've got to be a politician, lawyer or a spindoctor for the way you present facts.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
More on the Ubiquitous Wiretapping Bill
Swedish NSA to monitor all phones, Internet
Excerpt from first link:
The bill's name is en anpassad försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet , translating roughly to a better adapted military intelligence gathering. Key points of the bill:
Read it again: Telia-Sonera's customers could not access those sites. Full Stop.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
For email there is a simple solution. ... we need to work it out!
For everything else
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Now that you've started following our bad example, where am I going to migrate to?
I must be new here...
FRA stands for FÃrsvarets Radioanstalt, if you really want the swedish word for it.
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
Take your pick: http://snarkerati.com/movie-news/the-top-50-dystopian-movies-of-all-time/
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.
where you will go searching for information about xyz, and no one out there will have any record of your search?
i'm not talking about government policy here, i'm talking about basic understanding of the technology: don't you think it is rather absurd of you to expect anonymity from a system that is fundamentally nothing but open packets traversing random nodes?
once you accept the notion of the complete lack of anonymity on the internet, why do you expect government policy to suddenly come in, and not only vanquish the fundamental truths of the technology of the internet, but also to suddenly behave in a virtuous way that no government has ever behaved in?
protect your own privacy. to depend upon others to protect your privacy for you is insanity. you want a government, a GOVERNMENT, to value your privacy more than you value your own privacy yourself (because you rely on others to protect your privacy for you). its an absurd position
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Actually Finnish law required that.
According to Finnish law e-mail has very high level of privacy protection.
So in order not to break Finnish law they were practically forced to move the servers to Finland as they could not guarantee e-mail privacy otherwise.
Demand encryption from vendors. Encourage others to do so.
No sig today...
- ...
- we do know that they have the world's fifth most powerful computer, in competition mostly with nuclear physics labs.
- "Customers" that will be able to place requests for searches include all authorities (all some 500 of them including Department of Transportation, Department of Agriculture, etc., but notably the police, secret service and customs)....
Interesting. So the PRNG flaws that get introduced every few years are, in effect, backdoors accessible to the FRA but probably out of reach of casual troublemakers.Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
That's what I wanted to say, was looking for a comment if someone had already mentioned it.
According to "Ny Teknik" or whatever page I found it's made up of a cluster of 2128 blade servers from HP.
Theoretical max 182 Tflops, seems like it made second place when compared to the june list / when it was done / news out.
It's number fifth on november 2007 list:
http://www.top500.org/lists/2007/11
System in question:
http://www.top500.org/system/8819
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.
From his blog: http://federley.blogspot.com/
"Vad som kommer att ske den 17 juni? Ja vem vet. Kan ju bli pÃ¥kÃrd, sjuk, vara pÃ¥ resande fot, bli gravid eller bara vara dÃr och rÃsta ja. Vem vet. Den dagen den sorgen."
Translation:
"What will happen on the 17:th of June? Well, who knows? I might be hit by a car, become ill, spend the day travelling, become pregnant or just be there and vote yes. That day, that sorrow..."
The sad fact of life is that Swedish MP:s serve almost entirely on the whim of their party leadership. If they make trouble, they get wiped off the list in the next election, and they're gone.
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.
Hawks likes to lecture about privacy in his books, but has little idea how surveilance and privacy technology actually work. This would be forgivable if the story made up for Hawk's lack of knowledge about the subject matter, but the characters are dreary and the story dragged-out and dull.
you believe a government that harasses people just for exercising their democratic rights would wait for a law to spy on you?
why do you trust the government to behave so upstanding and forthright on one hand, and then expect nothing from them but fascist harassment... all in the same thought?
fix your impression of the government in one of the two modes you present to me in your statements above:
1. the government obeys the letter of the law all of the time, it is always well-behaved
2. the government wants to harass you for ideological reasons and exercising your democratic rights
whichever operating assumption you pick, you reach 1 of 2 conclusions:
1. the government is well-behaved. therefore, that they are privy to all internet communiction (they already are) doesn't bother me, they won't behave badly with that info
2. the government is fascist. therefore, it doesn't matter what laws exist, they will do whatever the hell they want anyway and rape my freedoms
you can't have it both ways friend. either the government is well-behaved, or it isn't. you can't expect good behavior (they will respect my rights) at the same time you expect bad behavior (they will rape my rights). it's one or the other
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
it either snoops or it doesn't
there is no model of the internet where you are wrapped in a magic tcp/ip bubblewrap cloak of protection from government snooping
it's not about the the law. you have a fundamental misunderstanding about your privacy and the technology involved. once you understand how the internet works, you wouldn't expect absurd things like "go ahead and snoop, but just not on me"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Telia-Sonera did not block webtraffic Cogent Communications did!
FTFA:
Cogent has decided not to exchange traffic directly with TeliaSonera's AS 1299 or indirectly with AS 1299 through a third-party provider. As a result, Cogent has partitioned the Internet and disrupted the flow of traffic between Cogent and TeliaSonera customers. While this has a negative impact on some users of the Internet, this effect is the result of Cogent's decision and is unfortunately beyond TeliaSonera's control. Until Cogent rectifies this situation, TeliaSonera customers experiencing any difficulty reaching Cogent's network can continue to purchase IP Transit from TeliaSonera along with another Tier 1 provider. This will fix the immediate problem and ensure optimal connectivity going forward. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused⦠If you have further concerns, please address your commercial contact at TeliaSonera
Care to explain to us who are not wearing tinfiol hats how this can be interpreted as TeliaSonera willfully blocking traffic to Open Standards sites?
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
A English Source From Sweden
http://www.thelocal.se/12252/20080605/
the question is, why do you think that such a villainous government would wait for a stupid law to sift the internet? either the government acts virtuously, or it doesn't. currently, your operating assumption about how the government acts has contradictory characteristics: on one hand, you expect a law to be passed, and then suddenly every governmental official will behave unerringly to the letter of that law. on the other hand, you expect the government to go out and rape your rights in secret no matter what. it's either one or the other as a basis for your opinion. your opinion can't be valid if it is base don a characterization of the government which is contradictory in the same scenario
you can't use proof of the government doing sneaky evil things to compel a law... that a sneaky evil government will somehow respect? its absurd of you. the law does not offer protection from what you fear, so why do you spend your time focusing on the importance of a bulwark of protection that offers no real protection from what you fear?
no law will compel the virtue that you seek, no law is protection from what they can and cannot do. if your snail mail was protected by law from snooping, do you think that law would stop them from snooping anyway if they wanted to? why do you think it is any different with the internet? why do you expect a flimsy law to compel unvirtuous people to be virtuous?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Actually it's quite normal for european members of parliament to be forced to go along with their party's stance. In a few countries the parties can actually override a member's vote on a law.
...".
...
In all other countries it's easy to get thrown out of a party meaning that you have little chance to ever again make an impact on politics. But sometimes this means that you just got "unelected".
So acting all "courageous" wouldn't have done any good.
But the european system doesn't represent the will of the majority so much as it goes as far as what some 50% of the population will not revolt over (which isn't all that far).
This isn't America were you have coherent government. This is Europe. If you want to understand European politics think "how would a government react if the president were republican, the vice president democratic, the secretary of state republican,
In other words you get the combined downsides of all parties : massive taxes (democrat), sweeping investigative powers (rep.), no freedom of speech (dem.), direct judicial interference by unions (dem.),
And if you have an issue like nuclear power, which one of the parties thinks unacceptable, only an absolute majority (which almost never happens, > 66% for one party) can TRY to override it, and even then you'll never hear the end of it on TV.
European governments are utterly blocked and halted things. They never do anything. The EU only manages to do things because it's a completely undemocratic institution governed by unelected (appointed by the prime minister of the respective countries) representatives. In other words : it's like the american executive power : with a few qualifications it's in the hands of one singular person, but it's a law-giving AND executive AND judicial power.
Therefore laws like this don't make sense, since the EU can simply override them. Making them worse (or better, but I've yet to see that happen)
The outage affected key standards sites covering the OOXML problem. The outage suddenly lifted hours after the OOXML vote.
The blockage was marketed as an attempt to break net neutrality. However, choosing a network hosting key information sites at a crucial period just prior to an important decision was a bit of cleverness.
Telia-Sonera could have easily routed around the outage, but chose not to. As a result, Telia-Sonera's customers (both business and private) were blocked by actions/inactions by Telia-Sonera from accessing sites which were hosted by or used DNS services on that other network.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Can Do vs. Will Do is a non-issue. I'm perfectly fine with the fact that they're not allowed to read my mail, but the mere suggestion that they COULD read if they wanted to is intolerable!
I refuse to to allow such a thing, on principle. If they CAN read my e-mail it doesn't matter if the want to or not, eventually someone will abuse this power and read them anyway.
Blog -
It is interesting that Sweden has tapped German international lines in 1940 and later and offered gathered information to Britains.
More about that here: http://www.ams.org/notices/200308/rev-bauer.pdf
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 the number of countries who read your email depends on the number of countries the servers are in that it passes through. At least with snail mail, you'd _see_ the greasy fingerprints and cum stains on the envelope.
That the Nordic socialist happy hippy countries were the liberal slacker's friend. How can this be?
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.
In Sweden, AallemansrÃtt allows free passage through the countryside as long as you respect crops and farmers gates etc. Clearly, the government now wants to tip-toe through peoples electronic mail in return. Seems fair enough to me ;)
Some issues are worth getting thrown out of the party come next election for, this is one of them.
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
Back when the Soviet Union was tyrannizing everyone in it like this wiretapping, the "free" nations including Sweden, the UK and the US would never want anyone to think that we were doing it too. The example of the Soviets' evil was something of a deterrent to our own governments' being evil.
Our governments still did evil. But the threat of being exposed as "as bad as the Soviets" tended to minimize it. Without the Soviet counterexample, our governments are going as wild on us as the Soviets were.
And since Putin's Russia is a KGB paradise, the Russians probably have it just as bad as back then now, too.
--
make install -not war
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.
Guess you prefer FRA to read my mail instead. No thanks.
There are 2 types of people in the world - those who understand decimal and those who don't.
Then he should have been independant, or have gone for the position in the EU comission, in other words, he should have bribed the leader of the largest party. Sorry but that's the way the system works.
And, should you think that's bad, try going independant in a union election. It gets worse. Much worse.
you believe that?
;-P
(snicker)
"This copying would also be illegal today"
there's that same fallacy: we need a law to protect us from people who don't obey the law
follow your opinion of the government all the way through: you say it is going to rape your rights, a heinous thing to do. ok, so, we will simply pass a law, and **poof** magically, heinous people will suddenly be virtuous
i'm not saying the government is heinous. i'm not saying the government is virtuous. i'm saying you need to make up your mind. because currently, you put forth both concepts: the government acts heinously. therefore, we need a law that the government will follow, of course... because it acts virtuously
make up your mind
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
the snooping doesn't make it possible to map your social network, the structure of the internet makes it possible to map your social network. you and other idealists basically say: "i want a free and open network... that is also locked up and closed" what?
look: the internet is good thing, because it is open. but all good things also have a downside. the downside is that any expectation of privacy is absurd in an environment which, inherent to the technology, has none
and then people compound this absurd expectation of unfettered access with an expecation of security and privacy, with the more insane expecation, drum roll please, that governments are going to act completely virtuous on this system and not snoop on you. you expect a virtuousness in government that no government has ever had in the history of governments!
2 absurdities, one compounding the other
protect your own privacy. don't, for any reason, believe your privacy ever was, is, or ever could be an inherent component of a system that is based on free and unfettered access. and certainly don't expect your GOVERNMENT to protect your privacy for you!
how can people be so schizophrenic as profess complete cynicism in how governments behave towards their citizens... but then also somehow expect a law or two here and there will suddenly impart magical levels of virtousness that have never existed in government behavior ever before. i don't get it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Article in todays Daily Mail:
Phone spies: Town halls using anti-terror powers to bug residents' calls and emails
Town hall snoopers used controversial anti-terror powers to delve into the phone and email records of thousands of people last year.
They wanted to check for evidence of dog smuggling and storing petrol without permission - and even to trace a suspected bogus faith healer.
In one case they were inquiring into unburied animal carcasses.
Some councils are allowing middle-ranking staff to authorise covert operations under the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which is intended for use 'in the interests of national security'.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
is the only way to snoop on network traffic
hilarious
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It is not required by Finnish law otherwise it will be againt CE law as it will create a distortion of the competition as services are free to be provided in the EU.
The Deliverator does not approve of meta-verse wiretapping.
Umm... overlords?!
DATABASE WOW WOW
Wow. You actually manage to make it sound like the swedish goverment is doing a bad thing letting people fleeing from a war into the country. I live in Sweden and I wish we would just accept any immigrant that comes here. Sure, some will be unemployed (but a lot fewer than you think), but I am prepared to pay the price. Tax money could be spent on far worse things than helping people.
I know we have come a long way with the internet, but I'm sure it still happens that something sent between 2 locations withing the country crosses international boarders. Would they then monitor those emails?
This isn't America were you have coherent government.
Um, what now? I know the grass is always greener on the other side, but good god man. Have you not been paying attention?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
European governments are utterly blocked and halted things. They never do anything.
You actually meant "they manage to do everything all at once, even the contradictory things, thus making most of what they do meaningless"? Because "they never do anything" implies that none of these laws get passed (which is what happens in the US when the parties are evenly balanced), but you're saying now that they just ALL get passed and because of that nothing works.
And this is because the Ministers of various things are free to act in whatever way suits their party without approval by Parliament, is that right? (Just trying to understand how this works. In the US, you do have different departments that can do some things autonomously, but in the end they all still answer to Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court and many of their ideas/proposals have to be directly approved by Congress. For instance, the Dept of Education couldn't just declare No Child Left Behind to be official policy, Congress had to approve it.)
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
you mean where instead of going through open relays i run my own wire from my house to kandahar?
"direct peering"
i do not think that concept means what you think it means
you catch the big major pipes. that's all you need to see everything. and you can do that in a number of ways in a number of places, without the notification or involvement of any company
the internet is not some weird foreign entity the govt needs to inject itself into. we are talking about a system that was built on top of an originally government project. the government has been there every step of the way. the internet has grown up organically on top of the government
when someone runs some new pipe somewhere, they know about it. no one laid some pipe somewhere that lots of internet traffic is moving over that the government doesn't know about
basically your position is: "we must stop the government snooping on... the network built on top of the government network"
absurdity
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
it's sweden you fool. the swedes are good people. who cares.
you've conceded that all of the major switches are already snooped on
;-P
what you are concerned about now is that the government will be able to snoop on the internet users who shape their traffic according to their detailed knowledge of quirkly local internet topology
how many people is that?
you don't win an argument by switching and confining the argument's scope to a neglible issue
so say the government gets all of these vast snooping powers now on these neglible traffic channels. if this is the last vestige of your freedom, i guess you never had any to begin with, and your resistance to these snooping powers are moot. which is my whole point
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No, no! Assuming Muslims will be a problem is naive. And also racist, but you already knew that.
I wasn't aware that Islam is a race.
During World War II the Swedes intercepted German traffic from Norway to Germany proper going over Swedish territory, and broke the T-52 encryption to listen in to what they were up to. I don't think that the Germans ever had a clue.
Will it blend?
Seriously, I'd put any cowardice ridden, shit-bag politician who votes yes on something like this directly in a blender. If they don't fit, I'd cut them up first.
I'm not kidding. Wire tapping is step one into 1984, and it's an inevitable step backward in human existence. Please, please somebody have the courage to do the right thing and off the mother fuckers involved in supporting this.
And then blend what's left of them. Thank you.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
FRA has apparently stated that they had already been using wiretaps. I think some posts in the thread mention that as well. The swedish environmental party (miljöpartiet) has requested that an investigation should be do to see if FRA has broken the law. Source here (in swedish)
http://www.piratpartiet.se/nyheter/riksdagsfraga_fras_laglosa_avlyssning_maste_utredas
to be nothing but a wish in the middle of a hurricane, god knows why you think the law ever protected you from anything, or ever would. the rule of law is exactly as you describe it in your first sentence, and then in your second sentence you make a solid statement of its total lack of worth. so which is it oh great guru, you have faith in the value of the law, or you have no faith in the value of the law? pick one, you can't have it both ways
"You need to hit the history and philosophy books before going any further down this path, or you'll manage to make yourself sound even more naive. You'll be surprised to learn that you're not the first to ask those rhetorical questions, and that they actually have been thought out."
gee, thanks dad, can i borrow the car keys? in your vast wisdom as compared to mine, one would have hoped that you would have learned at some point that patronization and condescension would engender anything but hatred in whomever you were talking to, prick
what an asshole you are
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You really think that the bought politicians would voluntarily break the silence and sue Finland in the European Court of Justice for enforcing its own privacy laws? I see a slight chance of this tactic backfiring, with Sweden being sued...
The price will be when the country is no longer Sweden or Swedish. Where will you, as Swedes, go when your country no longer exists??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The definition is - any packet that crosses the border. The fact that it will later make a reentry only means it gets recorded twice.
1. There is no "President of the EU"
2. Jose Manuel Barroso is the president of the European Commision. He, and the rest of the commision, is nominated by the European Council (ministers from member countries) and confirmed by the European Parliament (elected by the people)
3. The european commision has executive power, yes, but it only has leislative initiative, it doesn't vote on legislation, that's up to the Council and the Parliament.
4. Jose Manuel Barroso is not a socialist, he's a conservative.
Not that I like the way the EU is run, I do think there are some reforms needed, but the bullshit you're spewing is so utterly wrong I have to call you out on it.
Repeat after me .. We Will Encrypt All Traffic
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Who the fuck tagged this article with the tag "switzerland"????
Just how dumb can one be if you can't even use google to spot the difference
I'm sorry you are wrong, privacy really is required by Finnish law.
You can compete as long as you obey the laws.
Yes but if you have to locate your infrastructure in Finland then this no more obey to European free market law that prohibit this kind of protective behavior, and that's why there is privacy law at the EC level. It will be the same than saying that crope must be grown in Finland to meet local sanitary requirement. You may say it but it will not make it legal.
The law does not state the e-mail servers must be in Finland. The law is stricter than EU wide privacy law.
Telia-Sonera decided the easiest way to do accomplish that was to move the servers to Finland. They could have done it by other means, e.g. with encryption.
The free market law is not some magical silver bullet which overrides every other law. Same with crops - if they do not pass Finnish sanitary laws they cannot be sold in Finland. It does not matter if the free trade is hindered. It does not even matter if they pass laws of e.g. UK (remember the mad cow disease "incident").
Looks may help, but it's more than that. Women typically vote for perceived security over freedoms. This is most pronounced when they are single. When they are married they vote more like a man. Don't mod me troll until you've read the paper.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
Well, I have no idea if women votes for or against him, so it wasn't based on facts and therefor how they actually vote and neither of perceived security or freedom. It was just "but we are screwed anyway because they will like how he looks."
But you are probably correct.
Oh god how I wish you could pay yourself and then be left out in the cold when you realize your own foolishness. Instead the whole country is doomed to suffer for your crazy ideas.
Switzerland still looks decent. Hopefully they still allow Swedes to immigrate, though I wouldn't blame them if they banned us in order to prevent us from ruining their country the same way we've ruined ours.