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."

Comments

Sonera moved their email servers because of this

[kaarlov]

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.

Re:Hate to say this but...

[remahl]

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.

Not entirely accurate

[j1976]

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).

Its not a swedish idea.

[miffo.swe]

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.

ECHELON?

[Indyan]

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?

Re:Hate to say this but...

[miffo.swe]

"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.

Peep? Not so.. pretty loud buzz more like it.

[Henriok]

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.

Re:But will it pass?

[nx]

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.

More on this from Swedish Pirate Party leader

[CrystalFalcon]

Read more about this from the Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge:

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:

• At about 20 points in the national information infrastructure network, all traffic is spliced off and fed into the Försvarets Radioanstalt (FRA) agency. These points are placed as to catch all traffic entering and leaving the Swedish borders, but will catch much - if not most - domestic traffic too, for technical routing reasons. Electronic traffic, in particular, always takes the scenic route.
• This affects all Internet traffic and all telephony traffic, meaning web surfing, e-mail, phone, and fax are affected, to mention but a few.
• The FRA will scan all traffic in real time according to about 250,000 search criteria. The traffic that matches will be automatically saved for manual intelligence analysis. This obviously takes a lot of computing power. We don't know the exact extent of FRA's computing power, but 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).
• The political administration may order (not request, but order) a political wiretapping to catch communications they are interested in.
• Major businesses will also get access to the wiretapping grid, but will have to go through an authority.
• The bill specifically allows for singling out Swedish people for specific wiretapping, although only under certain qualifiers.
• The mandate for the agency's own intelligence gathering is broadened from "external military threats" to "external threats", which are exemplified as international crime; trafficking in drugs, weapons, or people; migration movements; religious or cultural conflicts; environmental imbalances and threats; raw materials shortages; and currency speculation. More examples are listed.

Re:Encrypt everything. ALL of it.

[mmcuh]

From what I've heard the snoops care more about who is talking to who than about what's actually being said. Mapping social networks and all that.

So in addition to encryption, we would all have to run anonymising proxies, such as Tor or Freenet.

Re:Sonera moved their email servers because of thi

[jhol13]

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.

Potential For Good

[Shihar]

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.

Re:Potential For Good

[aurispector]

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!