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Wiretapping Law Sparks Rage In Sweden
castrox writes "This Wednesday at 9am the Swedish Parliament is voting on a new wiretapping law which would enable the civil agency (FRA — Defense Radio Agency) to snoop on all traffic crossing the Swedish border. E-mail, fax, telephone, web, SMS, etc. 24/7 without any requirement to obtain a court order. Furthermore, by law, the sitting Government will be able to instruct the wiretapping agency on what to look for. It also nullifies anonymity for press tipsters and whistleblowers. Many agencies within Sweden have weighed in on this, with very hefty criticism, e.g. SÄPO (akin to FBI in the US), the Justice Department, ex-employees of FRA, and more. Nonetheless, the ruling party block is supposedly pressuring its members to vote 'yes' to this new proposed law with threats to unseat any dissidents. After massive activity on blogs by ordinary citizens, and street protests, the story has finally been picked up by major Swedish news sources. The result will likely be huge street protests on Wednesday. People have been completely surprised since this law has not gotten any media uptake until very late in the game."
Here are the links: http://www.gnupg.org/ http://www.axantum.com/AxCrypt/ http://www.rarsoft.com/
Here are two facts: 1) Google already said they will not place any servers in Sweden, in case the law goes through. 2) Sweden's prime minister in conjunction with the defense minister fairly recently (no exact estimate) signed a treaty with the United States of America with the express purpose of sharing information obtained with wiretapping. Sweden's and the U.S. systems will be "integrated" and experience shared.
Ergo: big business have already identified this threat and we've already established a nice contract with the U.S. Telia, the largest ISP in Sweden, moved mail servers to Finland because their Finnish customers were getting worried.
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
One main protest site here, there is also a Google translation here. Oddly, the Google translation has problems with common words such as "integritetsintrång", "utredningsbegäran" and "åsiktsregistrering". :P
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Modern cryptosystems do not rely on security by obscurity. They rely on the intractability of certain classes of math problems, in particular prime factorization and discovering discrete logarithms, or on the presumed impossibility of reversing certain keyed permutations without knowledge of the key, such as feistel networks. If you're interested, Wikipedia has very extensive articles on all of these concepts, and there are a number of good books that can be had for the price of half an hour's work.
Funny thing, I thought Animal Farm was about democracy failing due to an uneducated public.
Animal Farm is a fairly obvious allegory of the betrayal of the hopes of the Russian Revolution. (HINT: The pig 'Napoleon' is Stalin and the horse 'Snowball' is Trotsky). In Orwell's mind that was "democracy failing," but that is perhaps not how you meant the phrase.
Bear in mind that Orwell was a revolutionary socialist, who fought for the Trotskyist POUM in the Spanish Civil War (SCW) and that the POUM was crushed, not so much by the Falangists, as by the Stalin controlled Communist Party. Stalin during the SCW, was actively supressing all worker-led collectivisation of industry and reinstalling the middle-class owners in the (vain as it proved) hope of convincing France and Britain to join him in opposing Germany and Italy (who were involved in the SCW on the Franco/Falangist side).
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
One of the clearest statements of the goal of making the state "wither away" is in Lenins "The State and Revolution" which is mainly concerned exactly with the abolition of the state. For example:
Finally, only Communism renders the state absolutely unnecessary, for there is no one to be suppressed-"no one" in the sense of a class, in the sense of a systematic struggle with a definite section of the population.Arguably that is one of the chief sources of the Marxist-Leninist view of the state.
Note that Lenin did not advocate the removal of the state immediately - on the contrary he though it necessary as a way of suppressing the capitalists after a socialist revolution. This too is firmly rooted in Marx' and Engels writings - being the basis of the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" in contrast to the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" which was a term Marx' and Engels used to refer to capitalist "democracies" that oppress the poor.
What confuses people is often that what Lenin and his successors called a socialist state, people in the west started calling communist.
One can argue over whether even the socialist label of that society was true, and to what extent they followed their own supposed principles once they gained power or whether the many reprehensible actions taken were a perversion or abuse of the symbolism and support they had built with no connection to the original ideology. Regardless of which side one falls down on in that discussion, it should be quite clear that there was never even any indication from the Soviet leadership that the saw their society as communism in any shape, way or form - it was at least in name intended to be socialism.
This becomes even more clear if one studies the debates that raged in early Soviet society over how soon the transition to communism would be complete, and where depending on who and when you asked the answer might be anything from a generation in the future to hundreds of years - communism was seen as a long term goal by most people.
Animal farm is an allegory for the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism.
Old Major is Lenin (or maybe Marx), Napoleon is Stalin, and Snowball is Trotsky. The other characters and events were all based on Russian history.
This really isn't up for debate, unless you're a postmodernist, and frankly Orwell didn't like postmodernism.
"You see the problem is that the majority of people no longer believe in the Constitution or even know what it says."
Well if they don't have time to read it they could just listen.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo