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."

Comments

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[armanox]

Obvious answer - too many Americans believe that the government knows best.

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[poetmatt]

Obviously you've never had soylent greens, nor have you read 1984. Good job, move on, enjoy your perceived to be excellent life. The rest of us will keep fighting for what barely remains of most rights.

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[Nefarious Wheel]

If you tap peoples' phones for good reasons, pretty soon you'll be tapping them for bad ones.

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[Aeternitas827]

The US has long been resigned to give up freedoms gradually to 'ensure their security', but the end result is nowhere near worth the cost. Free thought has slowly been taken from us as a direct result of our willingness to sacrifice for no apparent reason; the current administration has really done nothing to be forthcoming with what is really going on, and we're on the way to being screwed as a result.

And this bit of legislation, whether we here in the States realise it or not, has much broader implications than just the privacy of Swedes being impeded; as I understand the article, any communications that hit Sweden are subject to monitoring; and as the article doesn't cite whether or not this requires the Originator or Terminator of a given communication be physically present in Sweden, this could include US-based items that pass through a network element of some sort that IS Swedish. And there's nothing to say that there won't be information sharing with governments of other countries, including ours, to implicate our citizens of crimes (where there are none being planned, let alone committed) on the basis of nothing but the content of a phone call or email that happened to cross through or end in Sweden. And it is foreseeable that the United States, in order to circumvent what discord there is domestically, may use that fact to continue the abuses that are already occurring, and in a way that may not be open to much challenge. All in all, this shouldn't be an outrage just for Swedes, but for anyone who would prefer that not everything they do be subject to some form of monitoring that is declared legal by some manner of court in the world.

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[TapeCutter]

Funny thing, I thought Animal Farm was about democracy failing due to an uneducated public.

Re:what about encryption?

[NoobixCube]

I'm sure Sweden, if this wiretapping law makes it through, will also pass a law making evasion of the law a felony. That way the people watching you don't even need to know anything about what they're doing, so you can fill the internal surveillance organisation with irreplaceable idiots, just like every other government department in the world.

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[TapeCutter]

"It's an important book to read - it's on the school curriculum in most western nations."

Yes, I first read 1984 at high school circa 1974. I think you need to bear in mind that the OP looks like an attempt at insightfull humour.

OT Trivia: In the appendix of my old copy it says (paraphrase) "C is a precise language used only by technocrats".

This is not an isolated incident

[Opportunist]

Anti-freedom laws are springing up left and right, and invariably they're pushed through in some cloak-and-dagger midnight sessions, often either completing the bare minimum of readings or even trying to get away with simply ignoring the necessary process. Pressure is being used to browbeat MPs of the ruling parties into submission (where necessary) while every trick in the book is being used to avoid informing the opposition (and population) earlier than absolutely necessary.

Makes you think. I mean, those people are supposedly being voted into office by the majority, supposedly working for their interests. Why the hush-hush-rush-rush? If you're doing what your voters wanted, why bother trying not to inform the press? After all, what you do must be in the interest of the majority, so why care about the outcry of some naysayers and professional paranoiacs?

You're doing what your voters want, right? Right?

Re:Bit confused

[castrox]

Small bits and pieces my friend. Mostly curious articles blowing in the wind. Nothing serious. We get mad proposals every once in a while - that's no reason to think they'd go through. This one, however, all of a sudden has broad support in the Government and parties in the Parliament - opposite to what anybody sane would think.

Also, people are slow - they reject it until it's in their faces and they are forced to act. Most people think that spying on the enemies is a good thing, but they never realized that they themselves, and their neighbors, would be wiretapped. That's why the uproar.

Re:what about encryption?

[debatem1]

If the technology exists to eavesdrop on a properly encrypted conversation we have bigger problems than some silly Swedes.

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[Phydeaux314]

*sigh* No, communism - the economic theory - has absolutely nothing to do with ultimate government control. In a communist system, there is no government. Perhaps you're thinking of socialism? Or Marxism-Leninism?

Quick way to make for less technology companies

[Fluffeh]

the largest ISP in Sweden, moved mail servers to Finland because their Finnish customers were getting worried. I would be too. Not sure if the Swedish folks really understand how much this sort of law will effect technology growth in their country detrimentally.

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[mOdQuArK!]

Actually, the final form of communism is about as far from centralized government control you can get. The big problem occurs because of Phase 2 when transitioning from a capitalist/fascist society to the utopian form of communism:

Phase 1) you supposedly have to instigate a revolution to get control of the society away from the rich fatcats,

Phase 2) there is a totalitarian phase where the revolutionaries assume absolute control in order to reconstruct all of the social & economic institutions to support the new communistic structures (while crushing any attempts by the fatcats to reestablish THEIR institutions), and

Phase 3) eventually everyone lives in little communes caring for each other (hence the name communism) and the political power is supposed to flow UP from those little communes.

I have forgotten just about all of the details, but this was the gist of what I remember reading (a long, long time ago) about Marxist Communism.

Needless to say, there hasn't been a major attempt at communism yet that made it past step #2. Somehow, the revolutionaries always seem to get stuck at that phase stamping out just one more discontented "enemy of the State" before they're quite ready to give up power.

The cynical might even suspect that, at least in some cases, the revolutionaries never actually intended to get past step #2, and instead were just using the "workers unite!" propaganda to build their revolutionary armies from the poor, desperate and gullible.

Re:Not anymore.

[plasmacutter]

that assertion is like saying the federal government has no say on the minimum drinking age, but we all know that to be false.

Internet == Civil Rights Movement

[copponex]

This may seem counter-intuitive at first, and believe me I don't compare any current people to MLK or any nonsense like that. However, like the civil rights movement, the internet offers a place for regular people to exchange information and ideas (at very little cost and in a semi-anonymous fashion). Websites like Wikileaks frankly scare the shit out of governments. The masses are, and always will be, the #1 enemy of the state.

Basically, as the internet grows more adept at connecting disparate people, the less likely we'll be willing to fight wars. I can go right now and become friends or at least become familiar with someone from China, Iran, Egypt, and even Iraq. Wars, especially for America, are extremely profitable for the propertied classes. It's the reason businesses like Standard Oil sold to the Nazis and the British in WWII. It's the reason IBM had no qualms helping the Germans index Jews for extermination. Now these same companies lobby to congresspeople on a daily basis, and you and I will probably never meet our representatives in person.

And people wonder why the needs of the people aren't being met. It's really quite simple - the people don't matter to most governments. They are the enemy. The people at the top -- you know, the 1 percent of people who own nearly half of all investments in the stock market -- really like things the way they are.

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[Kokuyo]

Funny thing, I thought animal Farm was about Communism failing due to greedy bastards exploiting their comrades.

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[KGIII]

Few people here have likely studied political science at a level of anything greater than basic history lessons in text books. The same people who think that the Soviet Union was communist also think that the United States of America are a democracy even though both of those two examples are pretty clearly neither a communist state nor a democracy but, well, this is /. and not politician dot I suppose.

Re:Shit,

[BetterThanCaesar]

Sweden has one of the biggest watching Brothers in the world. We've been registered for hundreds of years - first by the church, then by the state. We don't need to register ourselves to vote - the state knows if we are qualified. Most of us don't need to do our taxes, just send an SMS to confirm that the numbers are correct - the state already knows how much we've earned, how much we own, and how much we've got saved in bank accounts and shares.

And we trust Big Brother. We've voted for the social democrats for the most part the last hundred years. Parties win elections by promising tax raises. We trust Big Brother.

We're seen as a copyright safe haven because our laws are not yet draconian, but it's all a process. Our anti-commercialism of course plays a role here. Big scary USA companies want to create and enforce laws in Sweden? No way!

Still, people don't see Big Brother as Big Brother watching, but rather as Big Brother making things easier and helping us when we need him. That's probably why this law has become so controversial. It does not help Swedish citizens. We're not afraid of "terrorism". Our government can't pull that crap on us.

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[ppanon]

Actually, it is more like not enough people think the government is evil. It doesn't have to be. "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions"

Re:Our Voices Have Been Muzzled

[Toy G]

The revolution will not be televised. Grassroot orgs need to build their own media channels.

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[wellingj]

You see, the majority of government, for the majority of people, is not going to hell. The majority of people saw the NSA wiretaps as the government doing something, that's why it didn't hurt Bush's reelection. They think the war in Iraq was proper although they might believe it was mismanaged or manipulated to start it. I personally think it was 8 years too late. Clinton should have went in back in 1995 and Al Qeada wouldn't have thought our reaction to 9/11 would be blowing up another asperin factory in the Sudan. But that's another story.

You see the problem is that the majority of people no longer believe in the Constitution or even know what it says. My idea of hell is a government that doesn't follow the law by which the populace gives it's consent to be governed. They are breaking law. When I break the law I get smacked with it. The government gets off the hook because no one within the government, and not even the citizens being ruled over, are calling their shit.

The problem is, the road to hell leads to different places for different people. Your hell might be another persons paradise or you thinking that we are almost there might be interpreted by someone else as sitting a the cross roads figuring out which way to go. In all, it (hell, or the idea of it) is an opinion that someone holds but this opinion can vary greatly. It is apparent that the majority of people think we either aren't on our road to hell, or we are driving the opposite direction and going away from it.

The problem is that my idea of hell is being coerced by force. The government employs this tactic to no end these days. What it comes down to is not an objective look at what hell is to me, or what hell is to you. The government is breaking the Objective law set out in the Constitution. Now the law has some subjective value, sure. But the fact that the government is breaking the law by which it has right to govern has little to do if people 'feel like' they are in hell or not. Those rules were put there to restrain government from ever causing people so much grief. What really gets my goat is that they have tools to change the law, but dare not do it because of the out rage it would cause, so they just passively skirt the issue and call it a "living document". Bullshit. You don't like what's in there, change it or follow it, or consider the right to govern revoked.

Re:So much for

[myspace-cn]

It's going to get much worse.

Once the illegal wiretapping is in place, any plans that you have will be countered politically.

Any oversight will be nullified.

If you had rights in Sweden, they'll start deteriorating soon.

Then your economy is going to go to shit.

Sounds like you've already got your fascist media in place.

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[alexgieg]

Thats why almost everyone railing against the government seems to come off as or is viewed by the public as a kook or some sort of nutbag. True enough. People who just say the government is evil do an extreme disservice by using such hyperbolic rhetorics.

I myself use an approach that doesn't sound so "cool" as a shouting slogan is, but which people accept much more easily: I actually explain what the issue with government is. I tell them basically this: that any group, by being a collective of individuals, has a collective "moral level" that is at best the average of the "moral level" of each individual that's part of it. Thus, government being a collective group composed of all the people in government, you just have to ask yourself what's the typical politician's morals. If you can answer that, you can answer what's the average moral level of government itself. Compare that to the average moral level of the population as a whole, and it becomes pretty clear that government is almost by definition "just worse".

By switching from a "good vs. evil" discourse to one of relative scales where neither "us" nor "them" are at either extreme, but we both are in the middle, "they" just a little below than "us", those with whom I talk recognize that yes, we actually must watch government carefully so that they don't drop "too much".

Longer, but truer. And by being truer, it just works.