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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."
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
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.
"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.
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.
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
Oh, they have been doing that since 1976 (as recently revealed by a recording of FRA's director acknowledging it). This is an attempt to legalize that practice, add a few useless "control stations" and give them even more authority.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is not absurd when looked upon from a power perspective. Yes google can see any searches i do, but they wont see what i do at yahoo, so can site owners and most important, neither google, yahoo or any site owner has any way near the power to hurt me as my govenment has. Is is about the trust of the messenger, the same goes for the old postal service, snail-mail. This trust comes from the law. Today it is illegal to eavesdrop on private communication, this is what ISPs earn their trust from. The trusted part is allways the one who can hurt you the most, since you do not allow any info in the hands of the untrusted. This bill is forcing the owners of nodes to copy everything, even ordinary phone calls, to FRA for further analysis. This breakes the postal secret and the messengers trust. The anology is that the post office opens all letters but only looks closer on those meeting some criteria. The invasion of privacy is not in the first place to be looked upon closer, it is when the letters are opened by someone other than the reciever. The government should be transparent, not citizens. All countries where the opposite have been true, have been very nasty places to live in. In the seventies we had a scandal uncovered where the top suits in the byggest political party had created their own police who registered people. This had the result that many people that just happend to at the wrong place at wrong time got secretly blacklisted from job offerings, careers and some government services open to the rest of the society, in secret. Blacklisted people did not know, they did not have any way of defending them self. Half shut out from the society. This bill opens up for more of that, this is also exactly the reason behind the basic principles of human rights. To protect citizens from the regime, not protecting citizens from citizens or heaven forbid, protecting states from citizens. Citizens should be allowed to do anything not forbidden, for the state the opposite is true, it is not allowed to do anything without support in the law. This bill is creating a law-support governments should not have. Because as a citizen you cannot escape the government. So the trust will be lost. I will take the consequences if this bill gets passed. It is very sad, i will stop using the net completley, stop all my participation in communitys and program developing, no more mails. Shure i will miss it, but this is the end. I will not miss cellphones, because i have never owned one. In my 25 year working career i have never owned credit card either, so that i can do without in the future too. But the Internet i will miss. As i see it, they (actually the straussistic USA) demolished the library of Alexsandria once again. The end.
A English Source From Sweden
http://www.thelocal.se/12252/20080605/
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Why they would wait? Because they cannot do it today. The state simply do not have the access today, the infrastructure required is not built. What the bill proposes is that the owners of all bordering nodes should install special hardware and cables to the FRA, but not paid by the FRA. This copying would also be illegal today. So, none of the telcos have this infrastructure today, because it would both make no sense and be illegal.
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.
Football Odds
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.
Money for nothing, pix for free
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.
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.
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
No, it isn't even remotely that simple. Governments change. "Behaviors" which were benign under one regime may not be so benign under the next, or after a particularly spectacular national trauma removes previously-accepted constraints. When you allow those behaviors to be encoded into law, they are much more difficult to remedy when they are eventually abused.
You sound like one of those Free Republic types who defend the Bush Administration's endless expansions-by-fiat of executive power. I really wish those people would have had the chance to stand aside, powerless, while the same rationalizations were employed by Hillary Clinton. Maybe then they'd have remembered why they they joined the Republican party in the first place.